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.
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).
arXiv:2608.22429v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) capable of thinking with images often rely on external tools for fine-grained perception. However, this relian...
arXiv:2604. 02794v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Charts are ubiquitous in scientific and financial literature for presenting structured data.
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.
arXiv:2609.21675v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Despite the remarkable progress in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), prevailing Chain-of-Thought (CoT) paradigms remain confined to the natural...
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.
arXiv:2606. 16122v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Visual thinking should not only sound right; it should show its evidence.
The paper introduces PIVOT, a dual-level learning framework designed to improve visually-grounded multimodal reasoning in large vision-language models. PIVOT employs a self‑calibrated experience replay mechanism to selectively reuse valuable visual reasoning trajectories, and a vision‑guided advantage allocation scheme that assigns extra rewards to tokens with strong visual support. Experiments on multiple benchmarks show that PIVOT enhances the multimodal reasoning performance of these models.
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.
arXiv:2608. 19355v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Educational visual question answering, or VQA, requires models to solve curriculum-oriented multiple-choice questions using both language and visual evidence.
arXiv:2610.02117v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: On-policy self-distillation has recently emerged as an effective approach for improving language-model reasoning by supervising students with a froze...
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."