arXiv AI
6d ago

Can Linguistic Reasoning Vectors Enhance Multimodal Reasoning Ability?

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
arXiv Computation and Language
6d ago

Does Understanding Inform Generation in Unified Multimodal Models? From Analysis to Path Forward

The paper introduces UniSandbox, a decoupled evaluation framework with controlled synthetic datasets, to study whether understanding informs generation in Unified Multimodal Models. Results show a notable understanding‑generation gap, especially in reasoning generation and knowledge transfer. Explicit Chain‑of‑Thought (CoT) in the understanding module bridges this gap, and self‑training can internalize CoT for implicit reasoning during generation; query‑based architectures also exhibit latent CoT‑like properties that aid knowledge transfer.

By Yuwei Niu, Weiyang Jin, Jiaqi Liao, Chaoran Feng, Peng Jin, Bin Lin, Zongjian Li, Bin Zhu, Weihao Yu, Li Yuan