Beacon is a new agentic visual reasoning model that improves multimodal large language models (MLLMs) by better deciding when to use tools and how to use them. It introduces two key concepts—Mode Adaptiveness, which ensures tools are invoked only when necessary, and Tool Effect, which measures the net benefit of tool use— and trains the model with supervised fine‑tuning and reinforcement learning that rewards necessity-aware decisions and expands capability through expert hints. Across 13 benchmarks, Beacon outperforms other open‑source models, achieving the highest average score and the largest net tool‑gain on diagnostic tests.
By Qixun Wang, Yang Shi, Letian Cheng, Zhuoran Zhang, Yan He, Yuqi Tang, Qi Zhang, Xinlei Yu, Ruizhe Chen, Tianrun Xu, Yuanxing Zhang, Pengfei Wan, Haotian Wang, Xianghua Ying
arXiv:2606. 03005v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Despite rapid progress, multimodal large language models (MLLMs) still fail on tasks that humans solve effortlessly, such as navigating a grid maze from a screenshot or selecting the correct puzzle piece.
By Jianglin Lu, Hailing Wang, Xu Ma, Qihua Dong, Mingyuan Zhang, Yizhou Wang, Yun Fu
arXiv:2608.29286v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: As Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) evolve into sophisticated interactive assistants, their reliability depends not only on following instructi...
By Jinzhe Li, Gengxu Li, Jinnan Li, Yuan Wu, Yi Chang
arXiv:2511. 17731v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has proven remarkably effective for eliciting complex reasoning in large language models (LLMs).
By Lingxiao Li, Yifan Wang, Xinyan Gao, Chen Tang, Xiangyu Yue, Chenyu You
WOVEN is a new training source and benchmark for visual transition reasoning, comprising 36,076 examples across 20 scenes, 5 actions, and 8 reasoning types. The study shows that current multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have a systematic deficit in spatial, embodied, physical, and temporal reasoning, and that training on WOVEN improves performance on 22 of 26 external benchmarks by up to 27.3 percentage points. The authors also provide a training recipe that prioritizes reasoning operations and larger visual changes for robust visual world modeling.
By Zheyu Fan, Yue Zhang, Mingkai Deng, Kangrui Wang, Qineng Wang, Canyu Chen, Jie Hao, Xing Fan, Chenlei Guo, Eric P. Xing, Mohit Bansal, Manling Li
GraphVerse is a new benchmark for multimodal large language models that tests visual graph reasoning by combining perception, graph-based visual inputs, and multi-step reasoning. It introduces Graph-centric Image Editing strategies to actively challenge models while preserving semantics, and offers a VGR-Score metric that evaluates reasoning quality beyond simple answer accuracy. Experiments show current models have limitations in VGR and demonstrate the effectiveness of GraphVerse for broader multimodal reasoning tasks.
By Yuanfu Sun, Yuanhang Ren, Kang Li, Chuanhao Ji, Jiaxi Li, Jiajin Liu, Ninghao Liu, Qiaoyu Tan
MagiC is a benchmark for grounded multimodal cognition that evaluates vision‑language models on answer accuracy, step‑by‑step reasoning quality, grounding fidelity, and self‑correction. It contains about 5,500 weakly supervised QA examples generated from strong model outputs and 900 human‑curated examples with fine‑grained annotations, including rationales and bounding box groundings. The benchmark tests 15 models ranging from 7B to 70B parameters, introduces new metrics such as MagiScore and StepSense, and includes diagnostic settings to probe robustness against adversarial visual cues and introspective error correction.
By Chengfei Wu, Ronald Seoh, Bingxuan Li, Liqiang Zhang, Fengrong Han, Dan Goldwasser
The paper introduces Perception and Reasoning Attribution (PARA), a method that quantifies how much of a vision‑language model’s errors can be fixed by better perception versus stronger reasoning. PARA reveals that reinforcement learning (RL) benefits more from improving reasoning than perception, and motivates a new group‑relative attention distillation objective called GRAD. GRAD directly guides weaker rollouts toward the visual attention patterns of the best rollouts, consistently boosting performance across multiple model scales and benchmarks.
By Zeyuan Yang, Zhuohao Chen, Jiaben Chen, Yao Zhang, Maohao Shen, Chuang Gan
Current VLM evaluations often conflate language priors with genuine spatial reasoning. To address this, we introduce CRISP, a novel structural-diagnostic evaluation paradigm that assesses visual spatial intelligence through consistency, the alignment between implicit perception and explicit reasoning.
arXiv:2606. 26535v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Current VLM evaluations often conflate language priors with genuine spatial reasoning.
By Zhixing Li, Yinan Yu
arXiv:2506.09557v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) demonstrate impressive performance in benign scenarios, their cognitive reliability deteriorat...
By Zhaoyang Wei, Bowen Jiang, Xumeng Han, Jiashu Li, Xuehui Yu, Yuling Liu, Guorong Li, Zhenjun Han, Jianbin Jiao
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