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.
36
Pith papers citing it
Background
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
AutoFocus converts token perplexity into an anisotropic Gaussian uncertainty field to drive region proposals and shape-aware zooming for improved GUI grounding in VLMs.
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.
OMIBench benchmark reveals that current LVLMs achieve at most 50% on Olympiad problems requiring reasoning across multiple images.
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.
GRASP improves multimodal sarcasm target identification by anchoring visual regions in grounded chain-of-thought reasoning and using dual-stage optimization on a new balanced dataset.
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.
Saliency-R1 uses a novel saliency map technique and GRPO with human bounding-box overlap as reward to improve VLM reasoning faithfulness and interpretability.
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.
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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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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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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GRASP: Grounded CoT Reasoning with Dual-Stage Optimization for Multimodal Sarcasm Target Identification
GRASP improves multimodal sarcasm target identification by anchoring visual regions in grounded chain-of-thought reasoning and using dual-stage optimization on a new balanced 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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LensVLM: Selective Context Expansion for Compressed Visual Representation of Text
LensVLM trains VLMs to scan compressed rendered text images and selectively expand task-relevant regions, achieving 4.3x compression with near full-text accuracy and outperforming baselines up to 10.1x on text QA benchmarks.
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Enhancing Multimodal In-Context Learning via Inductive-Deductive Reasoning
A framework with similarity-based visual token compression, dynamic attention rebalancing, and explicit inductive-deductive chain-of-thought improves multimodal ICL performance across eight benchmarks for open-source VLMs.
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Scaling Video Understanding via Compact Latent Multi-Agent Collaboration
MACF decouples agent perception budgets from overall video length using latent token collaboration to scale video understanding in MLLMs beyond current limits.
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Q-DeepSight: Incentivizing Thinking with Images for Image Quality Assessment and Refinement
Q-DeepSight proposes a think-with-image multimodal CoT framework trained via RL with perceptual curriculum rewards and evidence gradient filtering to achieve SOTA IQA performance and enable training-free perceptual refinement in image generation.
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Test-time Scaling over Perception: Resolving the Grounding Paradox in Thinking with Images
TTSP resolves the Grounding Paradox by treating perception as a scalable test-time process that generates, filters, and iteratively refines multiple visual exploration traces, outperforming baselines on high-resolution and multimodal reasoning tasks.
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Act Wisely: Cultivating Meta-Cognitive Tool Use in Agentic Multimodal Models
HDPO reframes tool efficiency as a conditional objective within accurate trajectories, enabling Metis to reduce tool invocations by orders of magnitude while raising reasoning accuracy.
- Are Tools Always Beneficial? Learning to Invoke Tools Adaptively for Dual-Mode Multimodal LLM Reasoning
- Fill the GAP: A Granular Alignment Paradigm for Visual Reasoning in Multimodal Large Language Models