Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting is widely used as a test-time scaling strategy for Vision-Language Models (VLMs), but it remains unclear what is extended when VLMs generate longer reasoning traces. We ask whether CoT requires continued access to image tokens, or whether it mainly operates over visual information already made available earlier in the forward pass.
arXiv:2607. 12815v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting is widely used as a test-time scaling strategy for Vision-Language Models (VLMs), but it remains unclear what is extended when VLMs generate longer reasoning traces.
arXiv:2607. 15565v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Where should the question go in a vision-language model (VLM) prompt: before the image or after it?
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:2606. 11576v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modern Vision-Language Models (VLMs) benefit from chain-of-thought prompting and test-time scaling, but these gains often come with prohibitive inference cost due to large visual contexts and long decoding chains.
arXiv:2607. 09438v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Test-time scaling (TTS) reliably improves reasoning in large language models, but whether it transfers to small open vision-language models remains unclear.
arXiv:2605. 01733v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) hallucinate objects that are not present, and a growing line of work tries to curb this by feeding the model its own generated caption as auxiliary evidence -- assuming that a caption, once available, is something to consume.
arXiv:2608. 04726v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal large language models increasingly reason over screenshots and documents where the task itself may be written in pixels.
arXiv:2606. 20077v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Visual tokens enter Large Language Models (LLMs) as raw, foreign signals.
arXiv:2511. 19418v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) excel at reasoning in linguistic space but struggle with perceptual understanding that requires dense visual perception, e.
arXiv:2607. 26769v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multimodal large language models increasingly use sketches, annotations, tools, and intermediate images during reasoning, but it remains unclear whether they truly rely on these visual states.
arXiv:2606. 30185v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Improving vision-language models (VLMs) on visual reasoning typically requires retraining or hand-designed prompts and tools.
arXiv:2603. 06828v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We uncover a behavioral law of long-horizon vision-language models: models that maintain temporally grounded beliefs generalize better.