arXiv AI

MentisOculi: Revealing the Limits of Reasoning with Mental Imagery

arXiv:2602. 02465v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Frontier models are transitioning from multimodal large language models (MLLMs) that merely ingest visual information to unified multimodal models (UMMs) capable of native interleaved generation.

arXiv AI
Aug 5

CURV: Enhancing Chart Understanding Through Curriculum Visual Grounded Reasoning

arXiv:2608. 02833v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Chart question answering (CQA) requires multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to integrate visual comprehension with logical reasoning, yet current models struggle with accurate visual grounding and coherent reasoning chains.

By Xuehang Guo, Pingyue Zhang, Ruiyi Zhang, Zhenhailong Wang, Hanrui Lyu, Heng Ji, Tong Sun, Qingyun Wang, Manling Li
arXiv AI
Jun 10

ChartAgent: A Multimodal Agent for Visually Grounded Reasoning in Complex Chart Question Answering

arXiv:2510. 04514v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recent multimodal LLMs have shown promise in chart-based visual question answering, but their performance declines sharply on unannotated charts-those requiring precise visual interpretation rather than relying on textual shortcuts.

By Rachneet Kaur, Nishan Srishankar, Zhen Zeng, Sumitra Ganesh, Manuela Veloso
arXiv AI
Jul 9

Explain Before You Answer: A Survey on Compositional Visual Reasoning

arXiv:2508. 17298v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Compositional visual reasoning has emerged as a key research frontier in multimodal AI, aiming to endow machines with the human-like ability to decompose visual scenes, ground intermediate concepts, and perform multi-step logical inference.

By Fucai Ke, Joy Hsu, Zhixi Cai, Zixian Ma, Xin Zheng, Xindi Wu, Sukai Huang, Weiqing Wang, Pari Delir Haghighi, Gholamreza Haffari, Ranjay Krishna, Jiajun Wu, Hamid Rezatofighi
arXiv AI
Jul 7

MentalThink: Shaping Thoughts in Mental SVG World

arXiv:2607. 03530v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce MentalThink, a visual-symbolic reasoning paradigm that equips Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) with an executable mechanism for "mental" visualization.

By Kangheng Lin, Jisheng Yin, Dingming Li, En Yu, Yana Wei, Han Zhou, Liang Zhao, Hongyu Zhou, Hongbo Peng, Jianjian Sun, Zheng Ge, Xiangyu Zhang, Daxin Jiang, Jingyu Wang
arXiv AI
Jun 10

V-REX: Benchmarking Exploratory Visual Reasoning via Chain-of-Questions

arXiv:2512. 11995v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: While many vision-language models (VLMs) are developed to answer well-defined, straightforward questions with highly specified targets, as in most benchmarks, they often struggle in practice with complex open-ended tasks, which usually require multiple rounds of exploration and reasoning in the visual space.

By Chenrui Fan, Yijun Liang, Shweta Bhardwaj, Kwesi Cobbina, Ming Li, Tianyi Zhou
arXiv AI
Jul 31

See2Think: Do Multimodal Models Really Use Intermediate Visual States?

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.

By Siyu Yan, Zhuoran Yan, Haiying Xu, Panhao Zhou, Jingyu Chen, Chenhao Ji, Shuo Cao, Yongheng Zhang, Haoze Liu, Siyu Zhang, Xiwen Gu, Yihao Liu, Alex Jinpeng Wang
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 25

SyncLoop: A Multimodal Dual-Loop Framework for Self-Improving Mathematical Reasoning

arXiv:2507. 16518v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent advances in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown impressive reasoning capabilities.

By Xiuwei Chen, Wentao Hu, Hanhui Li, Yongxin Wang Jun Zhou, Zisheng Chen, Meng Cao, Yihan Zeng, Kui Zhang, Yu-Jie Yuan, Jianhua Han, Hang Xu, Xiaodan Liang