S1-VL combines structured scientific reasoning with iterative image manipulation via code execution to reach state-of-the-art results on visual and scientific reasoning benchmarks.
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Thinking with Images for Multimodal Reasoning: Foundations, Methods, and Future Frontiers
Canonical reference. 91% of citing Pith papers cite this work as background.
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Pith papers citing it
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91% of classified citations
abstract
Recent progress in multimodal reasoning has been significantly advanced by textual Chain-of-Thought (CoT), a paradigm where models conduct reasoning within language. This text-centric approach, however, treats vision as a static, initial context, creating a fundamental "semantic gap" between rich perceptual data and discrete symbolic thought. Human cognition often transcends language, utilizing vision as a dynamic mental sketchpad. A similar evolution is now unfolding in AI, marking a fundamental paradigm shift from models that merely think about images to those that can truly think with images. This emerging paradigm is characterized by models leveraging visual information as intermediate steps in their thought process, transforming vision from a passive input into a dynamic, manipulable cognitive workspace. In this survey, we chart this evolution of intelligence along a trajectory of increasing cognitive autonomy, which unfolds across three key stages: from external tool exploration, through programmatic manipulation, to intrinsic imagination. To structure this rapidly evolving field, our survey makes four key contributions. (1) We establish the foundational principles of the think with image paradigm and its three-stage framework. (2) We provide a comprehensive review of the core methods that characterize each stage of this roadmap. (3) We analyze the critical landscape of evaluation benchmarks and transformative applications. (4) We identify significant challenges and outline promising future directions. By providing this structured overview, we aim to offer a clear roadmap for future research towards more powerful and human-aligned multimodal AI.
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representative citing papers
Astra couples an RL-trained VLM policy with a view-consistent Bagel-based world simulator to enable agentic imagination during spatial reasoning, yielding benchmark gains on MMSI-Bench and MindCube.
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.
StemBind benchmark diagnoses MLLM failures in abstract visual reasoning by separating perception, rule induction, and answer selection on shared stems, finding a persistent rule-to-instance binding gap even when perception and rule are correct.
LatentOmni proposes a latent-space cross-modal reasoning framework that uses feature-level supervision and Omni-Sync Position Embedding to align and synchronize audio-visual latents, supported by a new 35K interleaved reasoning dataset and showing gains over text CoT baselines.
Proposes Spatial Narrative Score (SNS) evaluation for VLMs' camera motion understanding and introduces CaMo model achieving consistent performance on SNS and direct QA.
Proposes an equation-anchored tool-use method for MLLMs that writes the pinhole back-projection equation in Chain-of-Thought and substitutes retrieved camera intrinsics and depths to achieve robustness in 3D object detection and visual grounding under rescaled intrinsics.
GeoVista introduces a planning-driven active perception framework with global exploration plans, branch-wise local inspection, and explicit evidence tracking to achieve state-of-the-art results on ultra-high-resolution remote sensing benchmarks.
UniVLR unifies textual and visual reasoning in multimodal LLMs by compressing reasoning traces and auxiliary images into visual latent tokens for direct inference without interleaved text CoT.
CollabVR improves video reasoning performance by coupling vision-language models and video generation models in a closed-loop step-level collaboration that detects and repairs generation failures.
Pest-Thinker is a reinforcement learning framework that improves MLLMs' expert-level reasoning on pest morphology via synthesized CoT trajectories, GRPO optimization, and an LLM-judged feature reward on new benchmarks QFSD and AgriInsect.
LAT-Audio introduces a global-to-local reasoning approach with TWA-CoT that outperforms prior models on temporal tasks for audio up to 30 minutes.
Fine-tuning multimodal models on a new synthetic spatial benchmark improves generative spatial compliance on real and synthetic tasks and transfers to better spatial understanding.
GeoBrowse is a two-level geolocation benchmark combining visual cue composition with knowledge-intensive multi-hop queries, paired with the GATE agent workflow that outperforms no-tool, search-only, and image-only baselines.
TableVision benchmark shows explicit spatial grounding recovers MLLM reasoning on hierarchical tables, delivering 12.3% accuracy improvement through a decoupled perception-reasoning framework.
DMLR performs dynamic visual-textual interleaving in latent space using confidence-guided latent policy gradient optimization and a dynamic visual injection strategy, yielding improved multimodal reasoning on benchmarks.
A VLM planner that adaptively inserts latent visual thoughts of future states into its reasoning trace beats language-only and prior VLM planners on long-horizon kitchen tasks, especially under tight free space.
SegAnswer trains an MLLM to generate segmentation masks instead of bounding boxes when zooming into image regions during visual reasoning, yielding consistent improvements across perception and hallucination benchmarks.
Scene-graph-aligned SFT plus node-as-proxy GRPO rewards let small MLLMs outperform larger baselines on fine-grained visual reasoning tasks.
VRRL trains LVLMs for visually grounded self-reflection via prefix masking and buffered roll-ins, yielding higher out-of-distribution accuracy on grounding and navigation tasks than standard RL baselines.
ReVisIT achieves near-SOTA performance on open multimodal tasks by retrieving and reasoning over labeled images as visual exemplars in a train-free scaffold, closing the open-vs-closed gap for models like Qwen3-VL-30B.
AMVL applies bidirectional KL calibration to align answer-agnostic prior with answer-conditioned posterior in variational multimodal reasoning, reducing leakage and yielding +10.83 average gain on BLINK benchmark.
PixelEyes decouples reasoning and perception via mask-guided search and semantic BFS, introduces PixelEyes-6K dataset and Pinpoint-Bench benchmark, and open-sources code and models.
CoTIR fine-tunes a pre-trained image editing model using a differentiable CoT-style objective inspired by Lagrangian optimization to enable single-pass universal image restoration, supported by a new 5.2M-sample benchmark showing improved perceptual quality.
citing papers explorer
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S1-VL: Scientific Multimodal Reasoning Model with Thinking-with-Images
S1-VL combines structured scientific reasoning with iterative image manipulation via code execution to reach state-of-the-art results on visual and scientific reasoning benchmarks.
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Thinking with Imagination: Agentic Visual Spatial Reasoning with World Simulators
Astra couples an RL-trained VLM policy with a view-consistent Bagel-based world simulator to enable agentic imagination during spatial reasoning, yielding benchmark gains on MMSI-Bench and MindCube.
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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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StemBind: When MLLMs Get Lost Between Rules and Instances in Abstract Visual Reasoning
StemBind benchmark diagnoses MLLM failures in abstract visual reasoning by separating perception, rule induction, and answer selection on shared stems, finding a persistent rule-to-instance binding gap even when perception and rule are correct.
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LatentOmni: Rethinking Omni-Modal Understanding via Unified Audio-Visual Latent Reasoning
LatentOmni proposes a latent-space cross-modal reasoning framework that uses feature-level supervision and Omni-Sync Position Embedding to align and synchronize audio-visual latents, supported by a new 35K interleaved reasoning dataset and showing gains over text CoT baselines.
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CaMo: Camera Motion Grounded Evaluation and Training for Vision-Language Models
Proposes Spatial Narrative Score (SNS) evaluation for VLMs' camera motion understanding and introduces CaMo model achieving consistent performance on SNS and direct QA.
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Towards Camera-Robust 3D Localization: Equation-Anchored Tool-Use for MLLMs
Proposes an equation-anchored tool-use method for MLLMs that writes the pinhole back-projection equation in Chain-of-Thought and substitutes retrieved camera intrinsics and depths to achieve robustness in 3D object detection and visual grounding under rescaled intrinsics.
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GeoVista: Visually Grounded Active Perception for Ultra-High-Resolution Remote Sensing Understanding
GeoVista introduces a planning-driven active perception framework with global exploration plans, branch-wise local inspection, and explicit evidence tracking to achieve state-of-the-art results on ultra-high-resolution remote sensing benchmarks.
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UniVLR: Unifying Text and Vision in Visual Latent Reasoning for Multimodal LLMs
UniVLR unifies textual and visual reasoning in multimodal LLMs by compressing reasoning traces and auxiliary images into visual latent tokens for direct inference without interleaved text CoT.
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CollabVR: Collaborative Video Reasoning with Vision-Language and Video Generation Models
CollabVR improves video reasoning performance by coupling vision-language models and video generation models in a closed-loop step-level collaboration that detects and repairs generation failures.
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Pest-Thinker: Learning to Think and Reason like Entomologists via Reinforcement Learning
Pest-Thinker is a reinforcement learning framework that improves MLLMs' expert-level reasoning on pest morphology via synthesized CoT trajectories, GRPO optimization, and an LLM-judged feature reward on new benchmarks QFSD and AgriInsect.
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Listening with Time: Precise Temporal Awareness for Long-Form Audio Understanding
LAT-Audio introduces a global-to-local reasoning approach with TWA-CoT that outperforms prior models on temporal tasks for audio up to 30 minutes.
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Exploring Spatial Intelligence from a Generative Perspective
Fine-tuning multimodal models on a new synthetic spatial benchmark improves generative spatial compliance on real and synthetic tasks and transfers to better spatial understanding.
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GeoBrowse: A Geolocation Benchmark for Agentic Tool Use with Expert-Annotated Reasoning Traces
GeoBrowse is a two-level geolocation benchmark combining visual cue composition with knowledge-intensive multi-hop queries, paired with the GATE agent workflow that outperforms no-tool, search-only, and image-only baselines.
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TableVision: A Large-Scale Benchmark for Spatially Grounded Reasoning over Complex Hierarchical Tables
TableVision benchmark shows explicit spatial grounding recovers MLLM reasoning on hierarchical tables, delivering 12.3% accuracy improvement through a decoupled perception-reasoning framework.
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Reasoning Within the Mind: Dynamic Multimodal Interleaving in Latent Space
DMLR performs dynamic visual-textual interleaving in latent space using confidence-guided latent policy gradient optimization and a dynamic visual injection strategy, yielding improved multimodal reasoning on benchmarks.
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APIVOT: Adaptive Planning with Interleaved Vision-Language Thoughts
A VLM planner that adaptively inserts latent visual thoughts of future states into its reasoning trace beats language-only and prior VLM planners on long-horizon kitchen tasks, especially under tight free space.
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Segmentation before Answering: Pixel Grounding for MLLM Visual Reasoning
SegAnswer trains an MLLM to generate segmentation masks instead of bounding boxes when zooming into image regions during visual reasoning, yielding consistent improvements across perception and hallucination benchmarks.
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Scene Graph Thinking: Reinforcing Structured Visual Reasoning for Multimodal Large Language Models
Scene-graph-aligned SFT plus node-as-proxy GRPO rewards let small MLLMs outperform larger baselines on fine-grained visual reasoning tasks.
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Visually Grounded Self-Reflection for Vision-Language Models via Reinforcement Learning
VRRL trains LVLMs for visually grounded self-reflection via prefix masking and buffered roll-ins, yielding higher out-of-distribution accuracy on grounding and navigation tasks than standard RL baselines.
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Retrieved Images as Visual Thought: Training-Free Multimodal In-Context Learning for the Open-vs-Closed Gap
ReVisIT achieves near-SOTA performance on open multimodal tasks by retrieving and reasoning over labeled images as visual exemplars in a train-free scaffold, closing the open-vs-closed gap for models like Qwen3-VL-30B.
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Multimodal Continuous Reasoning via Asymmetric Mutual Variational Learning
AMVL applies bidirectional KL calibration to align answer-agnostic prior with answer-conditioned posterior in variational multimodal reasoning, reducing leakage and yielding +10.83 average gain on BLINK benchmark.
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PixelEyes: Decoupling Perception and Reasoning for Pinpoint Visual Evidence Seeking
PixelEyes decouples reasoning and perception via mask-guided search and semantic BFS, introduces PixelEyes-6K dataset and Pinpoint-Bench benchmark, and open-sources code and models.
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Universal Image Restoration via Internalized Chain-of-Thought Reasoning
CoTIR fine-tunes a pre-trained image editing model using a differentiable CoT-style objective inspired by Lagrangian optimization to enable single-pass universal image restoration, supported by a new 5.2M-sample benchmark showing improved perceptual quality.
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HYDRA-X: Native Unified Multimodal Models with Holistic Visual Tokenizers
HYDRA-X presents the first unified multimodal model using a single ViT for holistic image-video tokenization, with ablations on attention and compression plus a latent-level editing improvement.
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ROVER: Routing Object-Centric Visual Evidence for Grounded Multi-Image Reasoning
ROVER introduces a learnable routing plugin for object-centric visual evidence in MLLMs via token triplets and differential attention, reporting gains on MM-GCoT and VideoEspresso when integrated into Qwen2.5-VL-7B.
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InterSketch: An Interleaved Reasoning Model with Self-correcting Visual Sketch and Stepwise Reward
InterSketch improves long-horizon visual-textual chain-of-thought in VLMs by dynamically generating and interleaving self-correcting visual sketches with text, using a synthesized dataset plus reflection in cold-start followed by stepwise-reward RL, and reports outperforming Gemini-3-Pro on benchmar
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Are Tools Always Beneficial? Learning to Invoke Tools Adaptively for Dual-Mode Multimodal LLM Reasoning
AutoTool uses dual-mode RL to let MLLMs adaptively choose tool use or text-only reasoning, reporting 21.8% accuracy gain on V* and 44.9% efficiency gain on POPE versus baselines.
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ToolCUA: Towards Optimal GUI-Tool Path Orchestration for Computer Use Agents
ToolCUA introduces a trajectory scaling pipeline and staged RL to optimize GUI-tool switching, reaching 46.85% accuracy on OSWorld-MCP for a 66% relative gain over baseline.
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When to Re-Commit: Temporal Abstraction Discovery for Long-Horizon Vision-Language Reasoning
Learns state-conditioned commitment depth in a 7B vision-language policy that jointly predicts actions and replan intervals, outperforming fixed-depth baselines and larger models on Sliding Puzzle and Sokoban while providing a theoretical dominance result.
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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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AutoFocus: Uncertainty-Aware Active Visual Search for GUI Grounding
AutoFocus converts token perplexity into an anisotropic Gaussian uncertainty field to drive region proposals and shape-aware zooming for improved GUI grounding in VLMs.
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Persistent Visual Memory: Sustaining Perception for Deep Generation in LVLMs
PVM adds a parallel branch to LVLMs that directly supplies visual embeddings to prevent attention decay over long generated sequences, yielding accuracy gains on reasoning tasks with minimal overhead.
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OMIBench: Benchmarking Olympiad-Level Multi-Image Reasoning in Large Vision-Language Model
OMIBench benchmark reveals that current LVLMs achieve at most 50% on Olympiad problems requiring reasoning across multiple images.
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Towards Long-horizon Agentic Multimodal Search
LMM-Searcher uses file-based visual UIDs and a fetch tool plus 12K synthesized trajectories to fine-tune a multimodal agent that scales to 100-turn horizons and reaches SOTA among open-source models on MM-BrowseComp and MMSearch-Plus.
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Test-time Scaling over Perception: Resolving the Grounding Paradox in Thinking with Images
TTSP samples and filters multiple zoom-in exploration traces and iteratively consolidates validated observations into an Evidence Ledger, improving fine-grained multimodal reasoning on V* Bench, HR-Bench, TreeBench, and MME-RealWorld-Lite.
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GRASP: Grounded CoT Reasoning with Dual-Stage Optimization for Multimodal Sarcasm Target Identification
GRASP uses grounded chain-of-thought with a coordinate-weighted SFT stage and a GRPO-style policy-optimization stage to identify sarcasm targets in text and images, evaluated on the authors' new MSTI-MAX dataset.
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Walk the Talk: Bridging the Reasoning-Action Gap for Thinking with Images via Multimodal Agentic Policy Optimization
MAPO improves multimodal chain-of-thought reasoning by requiring explicit textual descriptions of visual tool results and using a novel advantage estimator that combines semantic alignment with task rewards.
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Saliency-R1: Enforcing Interpretable and Faithful Vision-language Reasoning via Saliency-map Alignment Reward
Saliency-R1 uses a novel saliency map technique and GRPO with human bounding-box overlap as reward to improve VLM reasoning faithfulness and interpretability.
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Thinking with Drafting: Optical Decompression via Logical Reconstruction
Thinking with Drafting reconceptualizes visual reasoning as optical decompression by forcing models to draft mental models into executable DSL code for deterministic self-verification on the VisAlg benchmark.
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Dual Tuning for Reasoning Efficacy-Driven Data Curation in Multimodal LLM Training
Dual Tuning is a data curation method that jointly scores training examples for benefit and for reasoning-gain to choose between reasoning and direct-answer post-training modes for multimodal LLMs.
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AdaTooler-V: Adaptive Tool-Use for Images and Videos
AdaTooler-V trains MLLMs to adaptively use vision tools via AT-GRPO reinforcement learning and new datasets, reaching 89.8% on V* and outperforming GPT-4o.
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Skyra: AI-Generated Video Detection via Grounded Artifact Reasoning
Skyra is an MLLM that detects AI-generated videos by identifying and reasoning over grounded visual artifacts, supported by a new annotated dataset and benchmark.
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The Landscape of Agentic Reinforcement Learning for LLMs: A Survey
Survey that defines agentic RL for LLMs via POMDPs, introduces a taxonomy of planning/tool-use/memory/reasoning capabilities and domains, and compiles open environments from over 500 papers.
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V-Zero: Answer-Label-Free On-Policy Distillation with Contrastive Evidence Gating for Fine-Grained Visual Reasoning
V-Zero trains MLLMs for visual reasoning without answer labels by gating on-policy distillation trajectories using contrastive evidence from relevant versus negative image crops.
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PointVG-R: Internalizing Geometric Reasoning in MLLMs for Precise Pointing Localization via Visual Chain of Thought
PointVG-R is a new MLLM that reaches SOTA on pointing localization by 15.86 mIoU points via a geometric reasoning pipeline, EgoPoint-CoT dataset, SFT, RL, and variance-based reward weighting.
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AlloSpatial: Agentic Harness Framework for Spatial Reasoning in Foundation Models
AlloSpatial adds structured allocentric priors and a harness for tool-use and arbitration to improve spatial reasoning in foundation models, with 5-18% gains on VSI-Bench and MindCube in training-free settings and further gains after RL internalization.
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Grounded 3D-Aware Spatial Vision-Language Modeling
GR3D is a VLM that combines explicit 2D, implicit 2D, and monocular 3D grounding mechanisms to improve performance on spatial understanding benchmarks.
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When Think-with-Image Meets Safety: What Determines Multimodal Jailbreak Robustness?
Explicit image-tool interaction in VLMs cuts multimodal jailbreak ASR by ~30% on average; the effect is attributed to a safety-relevant shift in hidden representations rather than image semantics or text traces.
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Fill the GAP: A Granular Alignment Paradigm for Visual Reasoning in Multimodal Large Language Models
GAP aligns visual latent reasoning in MLLMs via PCA-mapped decoder outputs, auxiliary visual supervision, and selective capacity-guided training, yielding top supervised performance on a 7B model with evidence that latents carry task-relevant signal.