Attentive-CoT is an attention-guided fine-tuning objective that improves chain-of-thought performance in multimodal LLMs by delaying answer commitment and increasing sustained visual-token access during rationale generation.
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LLaVA-CoT: Let Vision Language Models Reason Step-by-Step
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Large language models have demonstrated substantial advancements in reasoning capabilities. However, current Vision-Language Models (VLMs) often struggle to perform systematic and structured reasoning, especially when handling complex visual question-answering tasks. In this work, we introduce LLaVA-CoT, a large VLM designed to conduct autonomous multistage reasoning. Unlike chain-of-thought prompting, LLaVA-CoT independently engages in sequential stages of summarization, visual interpretation, logical reasoning, and conclusion generation. This structured approach enables LLaVA-CoT to achieve marked improvements on reasoning-intensive tasks. To accomplish this, we construct the LLaVA-CoT-100k dataset, integrating samples from various visual question answering sources and providing structured reasoning annotations. Besides, we propose a test-time stage-wise retracing search method (SWIRES), which enables effective and efficient test-time scaling. Remarkably, with only 100k training samples and test-time scaling, LLaVA-CoT not only outperforms its base model by 9.4% on a wide range of multimodal reasoning benchmarks, but also surpasses the performance of larger and even closed-source models, such as Gemini-1.5-pro, GPT-4o-mini, and Llama-3.2-90B-Vision-Instruct. The code, dataset, and pre-trained weights are publicly available at https://github.com/PKU-YuanGroup/LLaVA-CoT.
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representative citing papers
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GPS trains a small model on optimization history to predict prompt difficulty and select intermediate-difficulty diverse batches, yielding better training efficiency, final performance, and test-time allocation than baselines on reasoning benchmarks.
Latent Visual Reasoning enables autoregressive generation of latent visual states that reconstruct critical image tokens, yielding gains on perception-heavy VQA benchmarks such as 71.67% on MMVP.
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VGR introduces a visual-grounded reasoning MLLM that detects and replays image regions during inference, achieving gains on visual benchmarks with 30% fewer image tokens than the LLaVA-NeXT-7B baseline.
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RL on Qwen2-VL-2B with SAT dataset produces R1-like reasoning and 59.47% CVBench accuracy, outperforming base model by ~30% and SFT by ~2%.
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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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Attention-guided Fine-tuning of Multimodal Large Language Models Improves Chain-of-Thought Reasoning
Attentive-CoT is an attention-guided fine-tuning objective that improves chain-of-thought performance in multimodal LLMs by delaying answer commitment and increasing sustained visual-token access during rationale generation.
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Test-Time Hinting for Black-Box Vision-Language Models
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Small Generalizable Prompt Predictive Models Can Steer Efficient RL Post-Training of Large Reasoning Models
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CAVE: A Structured Credit Assignment Approach for Fragmented Visual Evidence Reasoning
CAVE is a GRPO-based process-reward method that improves VLMs on fragmented visual reasoning by crediting intermediate actions via belief update, evidence acquisition, and adaptive focus, shown on TRACER-Bench and public benchmarks.
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