arXiv:2608. 04726v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal large language models increasingly reason over screenshots and documents where the task itself may be written in pixels.
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."
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:2605. 18160v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In recent years, multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable progress, primarily attributed to effective paradigms for integrating visual and textual information.
arXiv:2608.30678v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Text-rich image understanding requires multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to organize OCR (Optical Character Recognition)-grounded evidence acros...
arXiv:2608.22174v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Unified multimodal models (UMMs) can perform both understanding and generation, raising a central question: can visual generation improve understanding...
arXiv:2606. 10833v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) demonstrate strong performance on general multimodal reasoning benchmarks, yet their ability to perform engineering reasoning remains largely unexplored.
arXiv:2609.00232v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved strong performance on OCR-centric document understanding and text-rich visual reasoning benchmar...
The ICDAR2026 Competition on Multimodal Reasoning over Documents in Multiple Domains introduced a new Visual Question Answering benchmark that tests reasoning over documents from eight distinct domains such as business reports, scientific papers, and engineering drawings. Twenty valid submissions from eight teams were evaluated, featuring approaches ranging from zero‑shot vision‑language models to multi‑agent ensembles and fine‑tuned multimodal systems. Results indicate that the most effective systems employ structured evidence extraction, retrieval, verification, and orchestration across multiple components rather than single‑pass prompting.
arXiv:2609.13158v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Vision--Language Models (LVLMs) are increasingly expected to perform visual question answering (VQA) over planar media. However, existing planar...
arXiv:2606. 15231v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in many visual tasks, but they often struggle with factual grounding when confronted with complex, open-world scenarios.
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).