arXiv Computation and Language

Cognitive Chain-of-Thought (CoCoT): Structured Multimodal Reasoning about Social Situations

The paper introduces Cognitive Chain-of-Thought (CoCoT), a structured reasoning framework for vision‑language models that divides multimodal social reasoning into three cognitively inspired stages: Perception, Situation, and Norm. CoCoT improves performance across diverse tasks—multimodal intent disambiguation, theory of mind, social commonsense reasoning, and safety instruction following—by 5.9% to 4.6% on average. Fine‑tuning on CoCoT‑structured traces further boosts accuracy by 5–6% without explicit prompting, indicating that models internalize the structured reasoning pattern and that the approach enhances interpretability and social alignment in multimodal systems.

arXiv AI
Aug 12

Evidence-Grounded Trustworthy Multimodal Reasoning and Evaluation Benchmark in Complex Urban Scenes

arXiv:2608. 10954v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) demonstrate impressive performance in benign scenarios, their cognitive reliability deteriorates significantly in complex scenes under adverse conditions.

By Zhaoyang Wei, Bowen Jiang, Xumeng Han, Jiashu Li, Xuehui Yu, Yuling Liu, Guorong Li, Zhenjun Han, Jianbin Jiao
arXiv AI
2d ago

Evidence-Grounded Trustworthy Multimodal Reasoning and Evaluation Benchmark in Complex Urban Scenes

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
arXiv AI
Jul 14

The Ebb and Flow of Multimodal Focus: Scheduling Visual Relay Windows for Grounded VLM Reasoning

arXiv:2607. 11436v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-language models increasingly succeed on multimodal reasoning benchmarks, yet their visual evidence often becomes unstable once it enters the language stack, weakening evidence-grounded reasoning.

By Wencheng Ye, Yi Bin, Yujuan Ding, Hongye Fang, Zheng Wang, Xing Xu, Jingkuan Song, Yun Zhang, Sirui Da, Heng Tao Shen
arXiv Computation and Language
2d ago

CoVA-SFT: A Large-Scale Dataset for Chain of Visual Abstractions

CoVA‑SFT is a new large‑scale dataset comprising 51.9K samples and over 222K multimodal reasoning steps that teach models to interleave text and visual abstractions across five layout families and 17 complex tasks. It includes explicit rationale formulations, agentic renderings, and verification loops to help models build and maintain internal visual workspaces for purely textual reasoning problems. A companion benchmark, CoVA‑Bench, contains 1,700 held‑out test samples for reproducible evaluation, and models fine‑tuned on CoVA‑SFT outperform all interleaved CoT baselines by more than 2× on average, though they still lag behind strong text‑only CoT baselines.

By Tsung-Han Wu, Heekyung Lee, Anya Ji, Haoming Chen, Trevor Darrell, Joseph E. Gonzalez, David M. Chan
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 23

PointVG-R: Internalizing Geometric Reasoning in MLLMs for Precise Pointing Localization via Visual Chain of Thought

Pointing-based visual grounding requires models to precisely locate target objects by deciphering complex spatial relationships between the visual scene and pointing gestures. Traditional methods typically encode input images into static feature representations and perform reasoning primarily within the linguistic domain, often overlooking the rich perceptual cues and explicit spatial geometry inherent in images.