arXiv:2608. 06938v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The visual reasoning ability of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) is crucial for downstream applications, particularly counter-commonsense reasoning, which requires models to reason beyond common assumptions.
By Chen Ling, Hanqian Li, Dongnan Liu, Keyu Qian, Jungang Li, Xinglong liu, Shiyi Wang, Xin Dong, Pengcheng Zhu, Wei Zhou, Linjian Mo, Nai Ding
arXiv:2509. 22415v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have achieved strong vision-language performance, yet their token-level visual evidence remains difficult to inspect.
By Jiawei Liang, Jianjie Huang, Ruoyu Chen, Xianghao Jiao, Siyuan Liang, Shiming Liu, Xiaochun Cao
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.
By Danae S\'anchez Villegas, Samuel Lewis-Lim, Nikolaos Aletras, Desmond Elliott
The study investigates whether attention weights in Vision‑Language Models (VLMs) accurately reflect model reasoning for visual inputs. Using causal perturbation analysis, it identifies three distinct processing modes—Faithful‑Sufficient, Faithful‑Distributed, and Non‑Focal—indicating heterogeneous visual attention faithfulness. The research also shows that human‑annotated ground‑truth regions align with model attention in only about 60% of cases, highlighting a systematic divergence between model visual reliance and human intuition across VQA, document, and chart tasks.
By Xurui Song, Weishi Wang, Zhongqi Yue, Kuluhan Binici, Tao Bai, Hongxin Shao, Daniel Dahlmeier, Jun Luo
arXiv:2609.39168v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has improved the reasoning capabilities of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), yet existing...
By Zhihan Zhang, Lizi Liao
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
The paper introduces LIRSeg, a method that replaces explicit Chain-of-Thought reasoning in multimodal large language models with a compact set of learnable latent tokens for reasoning segmentation. LIRSeg is trained in two stages—spatial alignment and GRPO—while employing extreme-advantage sampling, decoupled exploration-stability updates, and latent diversity amplification to enhance token informativeness. Experiments show that LIRSeg improves segmentation accuracy and reasoning efficiency, achieving significant gIoU gains over the VisionReasoner baseline and reducing reasoning tokens by about 16×.
By Tianhang Guo, Yulin He, Wei Chen, Wenjuan Zhou, Yuhang Li, Xinbiao Gan
arXiv:2608.22963v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are increasingly deployed as multi-step agents, where explicit reasoning supports task decomposition and tool...
By Yuchen Huang, Sijia Li, Jun Zhang, Yi R. Fung
The paper introduces Selective Probability Mass Concentration (sPMC), a training framework that strengthens implicit visual grounding in multimodal large language models by selectively regularizing attention heads most responsive to visual evidence. sPMC treats attention over visual tokens as a spatial probability distribution and encourages mass to concentrate on semantically relevant regions using segmentation-derived priors, while leaving other heads unconstrained. Across six multimodal benchmarks, sPMC yields an average zero‑shot improvement of 3% and gains up to 11.3% for various models by regularizing only 3%–15% of their attention heads.
By Jiaqi Deng, Zonghan Wu, Zhan Heng, Xiaoshui Huang, Huan Huo, Guandong Xu
arXiv:2603. 28026v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Multimodal multiple-choice question answering (MCQA) provides a standardized and objectively measurable setting for evaluating vision-language models (VLMs).
By Taeyun Roh, Suhyeong Park, Dongyoung Lee, Eunyeong Jo, Wonjune Jang, Junha Jung, Jaewoo Kang
arXiv:2605. 18160v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In recent years, multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable progress, primarily attributed to effective paradigms for integrating visual and textual information.
By Xinpeng Dong, Min Zhang, Kairong Han, Xu Tan, Fei Wu, Kun Kuang
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