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 Computation and Language
Sep 1

UReason: Benchmarking Reasoning-to-Generation Alignment in Unified Multimodal Models

UReason is a benchmark that evaluates how well unified multimodal models (UMMs) align textual reasoning with image generation. It contains 2,000 human‑curated instances across five reasoning‑intensive tasks—Code, Arithmetic, Spatial, Attribute, and Text—and compares direct generation, reasoning‑guided generation, and decontextualized generation. The study finds that while reasoning‑guided generation improves over direct generation, decontextualized generation consistently outperforms it, indicating that the visual semantics in textual reasoning are not reliably reflected in the generated images.

By Cheng Yang, Chufan Shi, Bo Shui, Yaokang Wu, Muzi Tao, Huijuan Wang, Ivan Yee Lee, Yong Liu, Xuezhe Ma, Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick
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
6d ago

Skip the Talk, Re-Focus on Vision: Latent Reasoning for Reasoning Segmentation in Multimodal Large Language Models

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 Computation and Language
Sep 14

MMGR: Multi-Modal Generative Reasoning Benchmark and Evaluation

arXiv:2512.14691v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Modern multimodal generative models can synthesize visually compelling images and videos, but it remains unclear whether this visual fluency reflec...

By Zefan Cai, Haoyi Qiu, Tianyi Ma, Haozhe Zhao, Gengze Zhou, Tingting Liao, Xinyan Velocity Yu, Kung-Hsiang Huang, Ke Wan, Shawn Lin, Parisa Kordjamshidi, Minjia Zhang, Wen Xiao, Jiuxiang Gu, Nanyun Peng, Junjie Hu
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 Computation and Language
Sep 15

Func-R1: Incentivizing Mathematical Function Reasoning in Multimodal Large Language Models

arXiv:2609.14779v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Performing deliberate mathematical reasoning in visual contexts is a hallmark of advanced Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) and requires a sophi...

By Mingze Yin, Xiaohan Wang, Dian Li, Haichao Yao, Yilin Zhao, Youjun Chen, Gang Liu, Jintai Chen, Yiheng Zhu, Chang-Yu Hsieh, Aimin Pan
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 25

Multimodal Thinking with Renderable Programs

The paper introduces SVGLM, a framework that integrates scalable vector graphics (SVG) primitives into vision‑language models to enable image generation within reasoning tasks. By treating SVG both as image descriptions and text instructions, SVGLM offers a compact and interpretable method for connecting text and image reasoning. The authors provide a curated SVG‑based image editing dataset and demonstrate strong SVG generation and image‑aware reasoning performance on a mathematical benchmark.

By Sunli Chen, Ding Zhong, Ziqiao Ma, Jiaxin Liu, Zeyuan Yang, Hao Zhang, Lie Lu, Joyce Chai, Chuang Gan