MERIT (Multimodal Evidence Reasoning over Image Tables) is a three‑stage framework designed to enable language models to reason over table images, which preserve visual cues and structural details that serialized textual tables often lose. The approach first adapts a table‑specific encoder through reconstruction, localization, and color‑conditioned supervision to address visual evidence acquisition. It then fine‑tunes the model with supervised evidence selection and reasoning, followed by reinforcement learning that rewards evidence correctness, calculation, final answers, and output format, thereby improving retrieval and computational accuracy in table question answering and fact verification tasks.
By Haoyang Jiang, Zhuotong Fan, Mingyang Yi, Ju Fan, Lanqing Hu, Xiao Zan
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...
By Changjiang Jiang, Qiannian Zhao, Lei Xin, Jinxiang Xie, Preslav Nakov, Zhuohan Xie
SLVR (Structured Latent Visual Reasoning) is a training framework that blends explicit chain-of-thought with latent reasoning for multimodal large language models. It organizes reasoning into typed latent stages—planning, grounding, evidence selection, and integration—each supervised by corresponding signals such as plans, bounding boxes, visual evidence, and final rationales. Built on Qwen2.5‑VL‑7B, SLVR consistently improves performance on multimodal reasoning benchmarks, achieving significant gains on MMVP, BLINK Relation, V*, MathVista, and ChartQA.
By Albert Gao, Bing Xue, Andrea Zanette
arXiv:2606. 17678v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) integrate strong text reasoning with visual inputs, yet their responses can be inconsistent with the underlying images, indicating ineffective utilization of visual evidence during inference.
By Yilian Liu, Sicong Leng, Guoshun Nan, Junyi Zhu, Jiayu Huang, Minghao Sun, Xuancheng Zhu, Yisong Chen, Zexian Wei, Xiaofeng Tao
arXiv:2606. 29984v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement Learning (RL) is an important paradigm for improving the reasoning capabilities of Vision-Language Models (VLMs).
By Peng, Lee, Yin Zhang, Yanglin Zhang, Haonan Wu, Zishan Liu, Ruoxi Zang, Xin Zhu, Jiayin Zheng, Jian Yao, Zefeng Ji, Fei Ma
arXiv:2609.35942v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Recent work in visual question answering has shown that vision-language models can exhibit strong reasoning capabilities by translating visual inputs i...
By Ting-Chih Chen, Emile van Krieken, Shujian Yu, Filip Ilievski
ReasonUni introduces a reasoning-augmented reconstructive post‑training framework for unified multimodal models (UMMs) that couples image‑to‑text understanding and text‑to‑image generation. The framework first reasons about the desired edit and its target state, then generates the target image conditioned on this reasoning output. A tree‑structured reinforcement learning method, TreeGRPO, jointly optimizes the reasoning and generation modules, yielding consistent performance gains across multiple benchmarks.
By Feize Wu, Zhiyuan Yan, Yuhuan Hong, Yuwei Niu, Zongjian Li, Zheyuan Liu, Bin Lin, Jinbo Yan, Jie Qin, Xudong Mao, Limeng Qiao, Guanglu Wan, Li Yuan
arXiv:2601. 07761v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) face a fundamental dilemma in video reasoning: they are caught between the prohibitive computational costs of verbose reasoning and the hallucination risks of efficient, ungrounded approaches.
By Yanxiang Huang, Guohua Gao, Zhaoyang Wei
arXiv:2601.08010v4 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Vision-language models achieve strong performance across a wide range of multimodal understanding and reasoning tasks, yet their multi-step reasoni...
By Chaoyu Li, Fei Tao, Pooyan Fazli
arXiv:2606. 17888v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning has extended from purely linguistic domains to multimodal scenarios; however, existing approaches often treat visual inputs as homogeneous or auxiliary signals, failing to capture the intricate and sample-specific dependencies between text and images in mathematical problem-solving.
By Wanshi Xu, Haokun Zhao, Haidong Yuan, Songjun Cao, Long Ma
arXiv:2608.21796v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Knowledge-based Visual Question Answering (KB-VQA) aims to answer queries that necessitate reasoning over external knowledge sources beyond the visua...
By Long Shu, Shuochen Liu, Wei Chen, Junda Lin, Zhi Zheng, Huijun Hou, Tong Xu
The paper introduces EASE, a method that enhances multimodal reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) by adding visual‑evidence process supervision. EASE transforms annotated evidence regions into smoothed visual‑token targets and uses them to guide attention during RL training, but only on high‑reward trajectories. Experiments on Qwen2.5‑VL‑7B, Qwen3‑VL‑4B, and Qwen3‑VL‑8B show that EASE improves average scores over DAPO by 2.5 to 3.1 points across perception, hallucination, visual math, and multimodal reasoning benchmarks, and diagnostics confirm better alignment of visual attention with annotated evidence.
By Ruina Hu, Chen Wang, Lai Wei, Jionghao Bai, Bin Yu, Weiran Huang, Kai Wang, Yue Wang