arXiv AI

The Cartesian Shortcut: Re-evaluate Vision Reasoning in Polar Coordinate Space

arXiv:2605. 09883v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: As current Multimodal Large Language Models rapidly saturate canonical visual reasoning benchmarks, a key question emerges: do these strong scores genuinely reflect robust visual understanding?

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
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
arXiv AI
Aug 24

Is Visual Prompting All You Need? Studying VLM Spatial Reasoning under Progressive Visual Scaffolds

The paper investigates how visual presentation affects vision‑language models (VLMs) on the SPaRC spatial planning benchmark. By adding lightweight input‑side scaffolds that keep the visual modality but make spatial structure clearer, the authors achieve up to a 34.0‑percentage‑point accuracy boost across multiple VLMs, and an additional 4.6 points when combined with GRPO training. Analyses reveal that these improvements stem mainly from reduced grounding errors, while rule‑based reasoning remains difficult, highlighting visual presentation as a key determinant of whether VLM benchmarks test grounded perception, downstream reasoning, or both.

By Lars Benedikt Kaesberg, Tianyu Yang, Florian Valentin Wunderlich, Terry Ruas, Jan Philip Wahle, Daniel Kurzawe, Bela Gipp
arXiv AI
Jun 11

MentisOculi: Revealing the Limits of Reasoning with Mental Imagery

arXiv:2602. 02465v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Frontier models are transitioning from multimodal large language models (MLLMs) that merely ingest visual information to unified multimodal models (UMMs) capable of native interleaved generation.

By Jana Zeller, Thadd\"aus Wiedemer, Fanfei Li, Thomas Klein, Prasanna Mayilvahanan, Matthias Bethge, Felix Wichmann, Ryan Cotterell, Wieland Brendel
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 25

Investigating Relational Reasoning in VLMs

arXiv:2608.23518v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) achieve strong performance in visual reasoning tasks, but it remains unclear whether they understand visual relations, or...

By Adhithya Laxman Ravi Shankar Geetha, Aulia Kharis Rakhmasari, Haleema Ramzan, Xander Yap