arXiv Machine Learning

SyncLoop: A Multimodal Dual-Loop Framework for Self-Improving Mathematical Reasoning

arXiv:2507. 16518v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent advances in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown impressive reasoning capabilities.

arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 15

Func-R1: Incentivizing Mathematical Function Reasoning in Multimodal Large Language Models

arXiv:2609.14779v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Performing deliberate mathematical reasoning in visual contexts is a hallmark of advanced Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) and requires a sophi...

By Mingze Yin, Xiaohan Wang, Dian Li, Haichao Yao, Yilin Zhao, Youjun Chen, Gang Liu, Jintai Chen, Yiheng Zhu, Chang-Yu Hsieh, Aimin Pan
arXiv AI
5d ago

Can Linguistic Reasoning Vectors Enhance Multimodal Reasoning Ability?

The paper introduces LIFT, a lightweight vector‑intervention technique that transfers reasoning capability from a base large language model (LLM) to a vision‑language model (VLM) without retraining the VLM backbone. LIFT defines Reasoning Vectors as differences in hidden states between a reasoning path with an explicit trace and a solver path without it, and injects these vectors into the VLM’s language‑side activations. Experiments on two VLMs across six reasoning benchmarks show that vectors derived from the base LLM consistently outperform those derived from the aligned VLM, indicating that the base LLM is a more effective source for recovering degraded reasoning. "whyItMatters":"The study demonstrates that a simple, frozen‑backbone intervention can partially restore reasoning abilities in multimodal models, highlighting the value of leveraging the original language model’s reasoning power."

By Ziyi Wang, Li Li, Aolin Zhou, Yankun Shen, Chonghan Liu, Shuxia Lin, Xu Yang
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 1

CoVA-SFT: A Large-Scale Dataset for Chain of Visual Abstractions

CoVA‑SFT is a new large‑scale dataset comprising 51.9K samples and over 222K multimodal reasoning steps that teach models to interleave text and visual abstractions across five layout families and 17 complex tasks. It includes explicit rationale formulations, agentic renderings, and verification loops to help models build and maintain internal visual workspaces for purely textual reasoning problems. A companion benchmark, CoVA‑Bench, contains 1,700 held‑out test samples for reproducible evaluation, and models fine‑tuned on CoVA‑SFT outperform all interleaved CoT baselines by more than 2× on average, though they still lag behind strong text‑only CoT baselines.

By Tsung-Han Wu, Heekyung Lee, Anya Ji, Haoming Chen, Trevor Darrell, Joseph E. Gonzalez, David M. Chan
arXiv AI
Sep 11

Beyond Surface Imitation: Contrastive Modeling for Reasoning Path Alignment in Multimodal In-Context Learning

The paper introduces a multimodal in‑context learning framework that uses contrastive demonstration modeling to align large language models’ responses with the required reasoning paths. By contrasting suboptimal and better responses and incorporating a response‑conditioned retrieval mechanism, the method explicitly guides models beyond surface imitation. Experiments on various multimodal tasks, especially visual question answering, show consistent performance gains.

By Mingbo Yang, Wenqiang Wang, Zhaolu Kang, Peng Chen, Yannan Chen, Sunshang Wang, Yan Xiao
arXiv AI
Jun 16

UniT: Unified Multimodal Chain-of-Thought Test-time Scaling

arXiv:2602. 12279v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Unified models can handle both multimodal understanding and generation within a single architecture, yet they typically operate in a single pass without iteratively refining their outputs.

By Leon Liangyu Chen, Haoyu Ma, Zhipeng Fan, Ziqi Huang, Animesh Sinha, Xiaoliang Dai, Jialiang Wang, Zecheng He, Jianwei Yang, Chunyuan Li, Junzhe Sun, Chu Wang, Serena Yeung-Levy, Felix Juefei-Xu
arXiv AI
Sep 15

UniCAR-RL: Seeing Better before Thinking Deeper in Visual Mathematics

UniCAR‑RL is an annotation‑free reinforcement learning framework designed to improve multimodal large language models’ visual mathematics reasoning. It decouples perception and reasoning by using three branches: Caption‑RL for perception optimization, Reasoning‑RL for logical reasoning with a gold image description, and QA‑RL for end‑to‑end question answering. Experiments show significant gains in mathematical and visual reasoning across various model architectures and scales using only raw short‑answer data.

By Yuzhe Li, Hao Yan, Hao Wang, Xingchen Liu, Ya-Qi Yu, Jihao Wu, Minghui Liao, Wei Chen, Yuliang Liu
arXiv AI
Aug 5

CURV: Enhancing Chart Understanding Through Curriculum Visual Grounded Reasoning

arXiv:2608. 02833v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Chart question answering (CQA) requires multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to integrate visual comprehension with logical reasoning, yet current models struggle with accurate visual grounding and coherent reasoning chains.

By Xuehang Guo, Pingyue Zhang, Ruiyi Zhang, Zhenhailong Wang, Hanrui Lyu, Heng Ji, Tong Sun, Qingyun Wang, Manling Li