The paper introduces Causal Visual Recurrent Reasoning (CVRR), a method that forces multimodal models to rely on latent visual states by using recurrent computation as the sole image‑conditioned path to prediction. CVRR initializes recurrence from the question hidden state after a pretrained vision‑language model has processed the image, repeatedly updates this state while re‑reading the same visual evidence, and removes all other visual traces before decoding. Experiments on several benchmarks show that CVRR maintains strong performance while other latent reasoners lose visual competence, and causal interventions confirm that predictions depend on the recurrent visual trajectory.
arXiv:2606. 01287v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent latent visual reasoning methods achieve substantial gains by inserting continuous latent tokens into multimodal language models.
The paper investigates latent visual reasoning in multimodal large language models, treating input, latent tokens, and final answer as a causal chain. Causal mediation analysis reveals two disconnections: latent tokens largely ignore input perturbations, and changes to latent tokens minimally affect the final answer, indicating limited causal influence. Probing shows latent tokens encode little visual information and are highly similar, leading the authors to propose CapImagine, an explicit text‑based imagination approach that outperforms latent‑space baselines on vision‑centric benchmarks.
arXiv:2604. 09757v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Medical vision--language models (VLMs) have shown strong potential for medical visual question answering (VQA), yet their reasoning remains largely text-centric: images are encoded once as static context, and subsequent inference is dominated by language.
arXiv:2605.18641v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Latent visual reasoning involves visual evidence more directly in multimodal reasoning by inserting continuous latent tokens before textual generat...
arXiv:2608. 04124v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Video question answering requires models to ground language queries in visual evidence and, when necessary, reason over that evidence across time.
arXiv:2610.01917v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Latent visual reasoning equips vision--language models with continuous intermediate states that can process visual evidence without explicit textual...
arXiv:2608. 15869v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multimodal large language models increasingly use visual chain-of-thought (Visual CoT) to reason about spatial, temporal, and embodied environments.
arXiv:2608. 19669v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Latent reasoning has advanced multimodal reasoning through a two-stage training paradigm: (1) a helper image is encoded into latent tokens to teach visual chain-of-thought during a supervised fine-tuning (SFT) stage, and (2) these latent tokens are further refined with reward feedback during a reinforcement learning (RL) stage.
Latent reasoning has advanced multimodal reasoning through a two-stage training paradigm: (1) a helper image is encoded into latent tokens to teach visual chain-of-thought during a supervised fine-tuning (SFT) stage, and (2) these latent tokens are further refined with reward feedback during a reinforcement learning (RL) stage. In this paper, we identify two key limitations of this framework, one in each stage.
arXiv:2603. 25629v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: While language reasoning models excel in many tasks, visual reasoning remains challenging for current large multimodal models (LMMs).
arXiv:2604. 14888v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent advances in vision language models (VLMs) offer reasoning capabilities, yet how these unfold and integrate visual and textual information remains unclear.
arXiv:2607. 06648v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Latent reasoning methods perform multi-step inference entirely in the model's continuous hidden states, promising more compact and efficient reasoning.