V‑Retrver is an evidence‑driven retrieval framework that treats universal multimodal retrieval as an agentic reasoning process grounded in visual inspection. It allows multimodal large language models to selectively acquire visual evidence through external tools, alternating between hypothesis generation and targeted visual verification. The approach is trained with a curriculum that blends supervised activation, rejection‑based refinement, and reinforcement learning, achieving an average 23.0% improvement in retrieval accuracy across multiple benchmarks.
By Dongyang Chen, Chaoyang Wang, Dezhao Su, Xi Xiao, Zeyu Zhang, Jing Xiong, Qing Li, Yuzhang Shang, Shichao Kan
arXiv:2606. 03273v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Visual DeepSearch requires multimodal large reasoning model (MLRM) agents to answer complex visual queries by repeatedly inspecting image regions, grounding intermediate reasoning in visual evidence, and connecting fine-grained clues across long reasoning chains.
By Hang He, Chuhuai Yue, Chengqi Dong, Chengcheng Wan, Ting Su, Haiying Sun, Jiajun Chai, Xiaohan Wang, Guojun Yin
Cross-image comparative reasoning remains challenging for vision-language models (VLMs), especially when correct prediction requires fine-grained attribute grounding and globally consistent reasoning. We present CoRe, a unified framework for this problem.
arXiv:2508. 10956v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Inspired by human categorization, visual reasoning about object properties, such as physical attributes and functions, involves identifying and recognizing low-level details and higher-level abstractions.
By Abhishek Kolari, Mohammadhossein Khojasteh, Yifan Jiang, Floris den Hengst, Filip Ilievski
arXiv:2602.09839v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Existing multimodal retrieval benchmarks largely emphasize semantic matching on daily-life images and offer limited diagnostics of professional kno...
By Yijie Lin, Guofeng Ding, Haochen Zhou, Haobin Li, Mouxing Yang, Xi Peng
arXiv:2604. 04917v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: What does it take to build a visual reasoner that works across charts, science, spatial understanding, and open-ended tasks?
By Gabriel Sarch, Linrong Cai, Qunzhong Wang, Haoyang Wu, Danqi Chen, Zhuang Liu
The paper introduces Mosaic, a multi-image visual harness that lets large language‑vision models (MLLMs) construct visual intermediates using ten composable image operations. It evaluates five re‑representation settings on existing multi‑image benchmarks and a new grounding‑focused benchmark, MosaicBench, finding that visual re‑representation benefits tasks requiring precise visual evidence more than those dominated by high‑level semantics. MosaicAgent‑8B is trained via reinforcement learning to compose these operations without demonstration trajectories, demonstrating diverse problem‑solving patterns.
By Gengyuan Zhang, Xiao Han, Xinyu Xie, Tong Liu, Volker Tresp
arXiv:2608.21796v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Knowledge-based Visual Question Answering (KB-VQA) aims to answer queries that necessitate reasoning over external knowledge sources beyond the visua...
By Long Shu, Shuochen Liu, Wei Chen, Junda Lin, Zhi Zheng, Huijun Hou, Tong Xu
arXiv:2609.13158v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Large Vision--Language Models (LVLMs) are increasingly expected to perform visual question answering (VQA) over planar media. However, existing planar...
By Yongqi Yu, Yu Zhang
LiteMedCoT-VL is a parameter‑efficient pipeline that transfers chain‑of‑thought reasoning from a 235B teacher model to a 2B student model using LoRA fine‑tuning on explanation‑enriched data. The approach enables a compact vision‑language model to perform medical visual question answering without relying on image captions, achieving 64.9% accuracy on the PMC‑VQA benchmark—an 11‑point improvement over the zero‑shot Qwen3‑VL‑4B baseline. Visual grounding analysis confirms that the model bases its predictions on image content rather than textual priors.
By Runze Ma, Shunbo Jia, Haonan Lyu, Guo Liu, Caizhi Liao
CORE improves compositional reasoning in multimodal language models by distilling a cross‑attentive reranker’s fine‑grained judgments into the embedding model. It generates candidate lists across five compositional matching levels and trains with a Rank‑KL objective to replicate the reranker’s ranking. Experiments on COLA, SUGARCREPE++, and NEGBENCH show CORE‑RERANKER‑8B outperforms Jina‑Reranker by 10.7 points, while CORE‑EMBED‑8B achieves the best overall average among evaluated embeddings, with gains also transferring to the MCMR benchmark without harming COCO or Flickr30K retrieval.
By Tingyu Song, Mingxin Li, Yanzhao Zhang, Dingkun Long, Chu Liu, Pengjun Xie, Yilun Zhao, Shu Wu
The paper introduces ViMoD, a lightweight framework that dynamically manages visual memory for multimodal large language models. ViMoD uses Deformable Aggregation of Region-wise Tokens (DART) to create content‑adaptive coarse representations linked to recoverable fine tokens, and Temporal Routing for Adaptive Contextual Evidence (TRACE) to anticipate and adjust evidence needs during reasoning. On the Qwen3‑VL‑4B model, ViMoD achieves superior performance across eight reasoning benchmarks with only a 20% visual token budget and minimal additional parameters.
By Yicheng Xue, Han Wu, Jufeng Yang, Minjing Dong, Xinghao Chen, Hanting Chen, Jianyuan Guo