arXiv:2607. 21552v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Unlike large language models (LLMs) that exhibit strong reasoning capabilities, vision-language models (VLMs) struggle with visual reasoning, even on geometry problems that admit equivalent text, diagram, and combined diagram+text views.
By Wen Ye, Yuxiao Qu, Aviral Kumar, Xuezhe Ma
arXiv:2608. 05131v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: On-Policy Self-Distillation (OPSD) has become a standard post-training approach for improving visual reasoning in multimodal large language models (MLLMs).
By Aniri, Jinhe Bi, Peng Liao, Zengjie Jin, Volker Tresp, Fei Shen, Yunpu Ma, Tat-Seng Chua
arXiv:2608. 15006v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Although visual reasoning is crucial for solving complex geometry tasks, existing vision-language models rely heavily on text-only reasoning.
By Penghao Yin, Haomin Wang, Qihong Tang, Xiaoye Qu, Hongjie Zhang, Xiao-Ping Zhang
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
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."
By Ziyi Wang, Li Li, Aolin Zhou, Yankun Shen, Chonghan Liu, Shuxia Lin, Xu Yang
Recent advancements in chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning have shown promise in enhancing video understanding and reasoning capabilities of multimodal large language models (MLLMs). However, existing CoT-based MLLMs require labor-intensive CoT annotations and incur substantial training and inference overhead.