DLR creates discrete latent tokens from rendered CoT images via clustering, enabling up to 20x compression and interpretable trajectories that outperform continuous latent baselines on reasoning tasks.
Imagination helps visual reasoning, but not yet in latent space
7 Pith papers cite this work. Polarity classification is still indexing.
abstract
Latent visual reasoning aims to mimic human's imagination process by meditating through hidden states of Multimodal Large Language Models. While recognized as a promising paradigm for visual reasoning, the underlying mechanisms driving its effectiveness remain unclear. Motivated to demystify the true source of its efficacy, we investigate the validity of latent reasoning using Causal Mediation Analysis. We model the process as a causal chain: the input as the treatment, the latent tokens as the mediator, and the final answer as the outcome. Our findings uncover two critical disconnections: (a) Input-Latent Disconnect: dramatic perturbations on the input result in negligible changes to the latent tokens, suggesting that latent tokens do not effectively attend to the input sequence. (b) Latent-Answer Disconnect: perturbations on the latent tokens yield minimal impact on the final answer, indicating the limited causal effect latent tokens imposing on the outcome. Furthermore, extensive probing analysis reveals that latent tokens encode limited visual information and exhibit high similarity. Consequently, we challenge the necessity of latent reasoning and propose a straightforward alternative named CapImagine, which teaches the model to explicitly imagine using text. Experiments on vision-centric benchmarks show that CapImagine significantly outperforms complex latent-space baselines, highlighting the superior potential of visual reasoning through explicit imagination.
citation-role summary
citation-polarity summary
years
2026 7roles
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background 1representative citing papers
DeepLatent introduces a parallel latent visual reasoning framework with learnable 2D tokens and continuous RL, trained via distillation then RL, plus a new 180K dataset, claiming SOTA benchmark results.
Latent visual reasoning improves multimodal models via training effects even without using latent tokens at inference, enabled by an attention-based RL reward that promotes interaction with text tokens.
RIS improves MLLM latent visual reasoning by retrieving spatial-semantic evidence, integrating it via attention bottlenecks, and synthesizing it with language transition tokens, yielding gains on V*, HRBench, MMVP, and BLINK benchmarks.
HypEHR is a hyperbolic embedding model for EHR data that uses Lorentzian geometry and hierarchy-aware pretraining to answer clinical questions nearly as well as large language models but with much smaller size.
MARS introduces mono-anchored advantage normalization to quantify information gain from multi-source integration in RLVR, yielding 3.2% and 4.9% gains on GRPO and DAPO.
Latent visual reasoning fails in current models because standard datasets make oracle latents uninformative and inference-time latents collapse away from useful representations.
citing papers explorer
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Why Struggle with Continuous Latents? Interpretable Discrete Latent Reasoning via Rendered Compression
DLR creates discrete latent tokens from rendered CoT images via clustering, enabling up to 20x compression and interpretable trajectories that outperform continuous latent baselines on reasoning tasks.
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DeepLatent: Think with Images via Parallel Latent Visual Reasoning
DeepLatent introduces a parallel latent visual reasoning framework with learnable 2D tokens and continuous RL, trained via distillation then RL, plus a new 180K dataset, claiming SOTA benchmark results.
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Retrieve, Integrate, and Synthesize: Spatial-Semantic Grounded Latent Visual Reasoning
RIS improves MLLM latent visual reasoning by retrieving spatial-semantic evidence, integrating it via attention bottlenecks, and synthesizing it with language transition tokens, yielding gains on V*, HRBench, MMVP, and BLINK benchmarks.
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HypEHR: Hyperbolic Modeling of Electronic Health Records for Efficient Question Answering
HypEHR is a hyperbolic embedding model for EHR data that uses Lorentzian geometry and hierarchy-aware pretraining to answer clinical questions nearly as well as large language models but with much smaller size.
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Does Seeing More Mean Knowing More? Mono-Anchored Advantage Normalization for Multi-Source Visual Reasoning
MARS introduces mono-anchored advantage normalization to quantify information gain from multi-source integration in RLVR, yielding 3.2% and 4.9% gains on GRPO and DAPO.
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What's Holding Back Latent Visual Reasoning?
Latent visual reasoning fails in current models because standard datasets make oracle latents uninformative and inference-time latents collapse away from useful representations.