Rea2Seg turns image segmentation into candidate mask discovery from MLLM attention followed by MLLM-based comparative scoring and selection, plus a new multi-dimensional reasoning benchmark ReasonSeg-SGDR.
hub Canonical reference
Multimodal Chain-of-Thought Reasoning: A Comprehensive Survey
Canonical reference. 100% of citing Pith papers cite this work as background.
36
Pith papers citing it
Background
100% of classified citations
abstract
By extending the advantage of chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning in human-like step-by-step processes to multimodal contexts, multimodal CoT (MCoT) reasoning has recently garnered significant research attention, especially in the integration with multimodal large language models (MLLMs). Existing MCoT studies design various methodologies and innovative reasoning paradigms to address the unique challenges of image, video, speech, audio, 3D, and structured data across different modalities, achieving extensive success in applications such as robotics, healthcare, autonomous driving, and multimodal generation. However, MCoT still presents distinct challenges and opportunities that require further focus to ensure consistent thriving in this field, where, unfortunately, an up-to-date review of this domain is lacking. To bridge this gap, we present the first systematic survey of MCoT reasoning, elucidating the relevant foundational concepts and definitions. We offer a comprehensive taxonomy and an in-depth analysis of current methodologies from diverse perspectives across various application scenarios. Furthermore, we provide insights into existing challenges and future research directions, aiming to foster innovation toward multimodal AGI.
hub tools
citation-role summary
background 13
citation-polarity summary
roles
background 13polarities
background 13representative citing papers
AVI-Bench is a cognitively inspired benchmark that evaluates Omni-MLLMs on joint audio-visual tasks and reveals substantial limitations in current models.
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.
Chain of Thought risk decomposes into oracle-trajectory benefit and trajectory-mismatch cost, with stability determining bounded, linear, or exponential error growth.
ProjLens shows that backdoor parameters in MLLMs are encoded in low-rank subspaces of the projector and that embeddings shift toward the target direction with magnitude linear in input norm, activating only on poisoned samples.
SCP defines a new benchmark task for predicting spatial causal outcomes beyond direct observation and shows that 23 leading models lag far behind humans on it.
Audio Flamingo 3 introduces an open large audio-language model achieving new state-of-the-art results on over 20 audio understanding and reasoning benchmarks using a unified encoder and curriculum training on open data.
CoLT replaces text chain-of-thought in multimodal LLMs with three supervised latent vectors, improving average accuracy from 75.7 to 79.1 across eight benchmarks while cutting text-decoding time 22.6x.
IV-CoT introduces an implicit chain-of-thought framework that decomposes visual queries into a structural-to-semantic cascade with training-only sketch supervision to improve structure-aware text-to-image generation.
CARE uses exponential moving average competence estimates to progressively shift RL rewards from exploration-oriented long reasoning to efficiency-oriented concise reasoning in video-MLLMs, with batch normalization and posterior amplification, yielding accuracy gains and shorter traces.
DynFrame introduces tokenized learnable span-density retrieval and Segment-Decoupled GRPO in video MLLMs, achieving competitive or SOTA results on six benchmarks with 4B and 8B models.
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.
Visual latents in MLLMs are systematically silenced by autoregressive training but can be unsilenced at inference via query-guided contrastive alignment followed by a confidence-progression reward.
ForeSight lets VLMs use low-level visual cues and mask-based visual feedback within an RL loop to reason more accurately, with the 7B model beating same-scale peers and some closed-source SOTA on a new benchmark.
OMIBench benchmark reveals that current LVLMs achieve at most 50% on Olympiad problems requiring reasoning across multiple images.
V-tableR1 uses a critic VLM for dense step-level feedback and a new PGPO algorithm to shift multimodal table reasoning from pattern matching to verifiable logical steps, achieving SOTA accuracy with a 4B open-source model.
Changing the internal reasoning structure of large reasoning models through simple supervised fine-tuning on 1K examples produces strong safety alignment that generalizes across tasks and languages.
CFMS is a coarse-to-fine framework that uses MLLMs to create a multi-perspective knowledge tuple as a reasoning map for symbolic table operations, yielding competitive accuracy on WikiTQ and TabFact.
EgoTSR applies a three-stage curriculum on a 46-million-sample dataset to build egocentric spatiotemporal reasoning, reaching 92.4% accuracy on long-horizon tasks and reducing chronological biases.
Position and step penalty plus visual reasoning guidance fix premature answering and weak visual grounding in diffusion MLLMs, delivering up to 7.5% accuracy gains and over 3x speedup.
C2F-Thinker combines structured coarse-to-fine chain-of-thought reasoning with hint-guided GRPO reinforcement learning to achieve competitive fine-grained sentiment regression and superior cross-domain generalization in multimodal analysis.
DRP decouples reasoning from perception in LMMs by using an LLM reasoner to query an LMM observer for visual details as needed, reducing visual grounding loss.
The survey formalizes MLLM perception as a unified vision-language capability and traces its evolution via a new five-stage taxonomy while outlining future challenges.
HAB applies coarse-to-fine budgeting to LLM reasoning, predicting per-problem depth and learning intra-step token budgets via PPL comparisons and adaptive Pareto optimization, yielding higher accuracy and lower token use than standard CoT on GSM8K and MATH500.
citing papers explorer
-
Reason Twice: Segmentation via Candidate Discovery and Comparative Reasoning
Rea2Seg turns image segmentation into candidate mask discovery from MLLM attention followed by MLLM-based comparative scoring and selection, plus a new multi-dimensional reasoning benchmark ReasonSeg-SGDR.
-
AVI-Bench: Toward Human-like Audio-Visual Intelligence of Omni-MLLMs
AVI-Bench is a cognitively inspired benchmark that evaluates Omni-MLLMs on joint audio-visual tasks and reveals substantial limitations in current models.
-
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.
-
On the Cost and Benefit of Chain of Thought: A Learning-Theoretic Perspective
Chain of Thought risk decomposes into oracle-trajectory benefit and trajectory-mismatch cost, with stability determining bounded, linear, or exponential error growth.
-
ProjLens: Unveiling the Role of Projectors in Multimodal Model Safety
ProjLens shows that backdoor parameters in MLLMs are encoded in low-rank subspaces of the projector and that embeddings shift toward the target direction with magnitude linear in input norm, activating only on poisoned samples.
-
SCP: Spatial Causal Prediction in Video
SCP defines a new benchmark task for predicting spatial causal outcomes beyond direct observation and shows that 23 leading models lag far behind humans on it.
-
Audio Flamingo 3: Advancing Audio Intelligence with Fully Open Large Audio Language Models
Audio Flamingo 3 introduces an open large audio-language model achieving new state-of-the-art results on over 20 audio understanding and reasoning benchmarks using a unified encoder and curriculum training on open data.
-
CoLT: Teaching Multi-Modal Models to Think with Chain of Latent Thoughts
CoLT replaces text chain-of-thought in multimodal LLMs with three supervised latent vectors, improving average accuracy from 75.7 to 79.1 across eight benchmarks while cutting text-decoding time 22.6x.
-
IV-CoT: Implicit Visual Chain-of-Thought for Structure-Aware Text-to-Image Generation
IV-CoT introduces an implicit chain-of-thought framework that decomposes visual queries into a structural-to-semantic cascade with training-only sketch supervision to improve structure-aware text-to-image generation.
-
CARE: Competence-Aware Reward Shaping for Adaptive Reasoning Length in Video-MLLMs
CARE uses exponential moving average competence estimates to progressively shift RL rewards from exploration-oriented long reasoning to efficiency-oriented concise reasoning in video-MLLMs, with batch normalization and posterior amplification, yielding accuracy gains and shorter traces.
-
DynFrame: Adaptive Reasoning-Driven Multimodal Framework with Dynamic Frame Augmentation for Complex Video Understanding
DynFrame introduces tokenized learnable span-density retrieval and Segment-Decoupled GRPO in video MLLMs, achieving competitive or SOTA results on six benchmarks with 4B and 8B models.
-
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.
-
Visual Latents Know More Than They Say: Unsilencing Latent Reasoning in MLLMs
Visual latents in MLLMs are systematically silenced by autoregressive training but can be unsilenced at inference via query-guided contrastive alignment followed by a confidence-progression reward.
-
See Further, Think Deeper: Advancing VLM's Reasoning Ability with Low-level Visual Cues and Reflection
ForeSight lets VLMs use low-level visual cues and mask-based visual feedback within an RL loop to reason more accurately, with the 7B model beating same-scale peers and some closed-source SOTA on a new benchmark.
-
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.
-
V-tableR1: Process-Supervised Multimodal Table Reasoning with Critic-Guided Policy Optimization
V-tableR1 uses a critic VLM for dense step-level feedback and a new PGPO algorithm to shift multimodal table reasoning from pattern matching to verifiable logical steps, achieving SOTA accuracy with a 4B open-source model.
-
Reasoning Structure Matters for Safety Alignment of Reasoning Models
Changing the internal reasoning structure of large reasoning models through simple supervised fine-tuning on 1K examples produces strong safety alignment that generalizes across tasks and languages.
-
CFMS: A Coarse-to-Fine Multimodal Synthesis Framework for Enhanced Tabular Reasoning
CFMS is a coarse-to-fine framework that uses MLLMs to create a multi-perspective knowledge tuple as a reasoning map for symbolic table operations, yielding competitive accuracy on WikiTQ and TabFact.
-
From Perception to Planning: Evolving Ego-Centric Task-Oriented Spatiotemporal Reasoning via Curriculum Learning
EgoTSR applies a three-stage curriculum on a 46-million-sample dataset to build egocentric spatiotemporal reasoning, reaching 92.4% accuracy on long-horizon tasks and reducing chronological biases.
-
Thinking Diffusion: Penalize and Guide Visual-Grounded Reasoning in Diffusion Multimodal Language Models
Position and step penalty plus visual reasoning guidance fix premature answering and weak visual grounding in diffusion MLLMs, delivering up to 7.5% accuracy gains and over 3x speedup.
-
C2F-Thinker: Coarse-to-Fine Reasoning with Hint-Guided Reinforcement Learning for Multimodal Sentiment Analysis
C2F-Thinker combines structured coarse-to-fine chain-of-thought reasoning with hint-guided GRPO reinforcement learning to achieve competitive fine-grained sentiment regression and superior cross-domain generalization in multimodal analysis.
-
Mitigating Visual Context Degradation in Large Multimodal Models: A Training-Free Decoupled Agentic Framework
DRP decouples reasoning from perception in LMMs by using an LLM reasoner to query an LMM observer for visual details as needed, reducing visual grounding loss.
-
From Structure to Synergy: A Survey of Vision-Language Perception Paradigm Evolution in Multimodal Large Language Models
The survey formalizes MLLM perception as a unified vision-language capability and traces its evolution via a new five-stage taxonomy while outlining future challenges.
-
Thinking Economically: A Hierarchical Framework for Adaptive-Complexity Reasoning in LLMs
HAB applies coarse-to-fine budgeting to LLM reasoning, predicting per-problem depth and learning intra-step token budgets via PPL comparisons and adaptive Pareto optimization, yielding higher accuracy and lower token use than standard CoT on GSM8K and MATH500.
-
VisionPulse: Dynamic Visual Sparsity for Efficient Multimodal Reasoning
VisionPulse is a step-wise visual token pruning method for LMMs that retains 5% of tokens per step, shortens reasoning traces by 11.2%, and maintains accuracy.
-
From Data to Insights: Exploring Program-of-Thoughts Prompting for Chart Summarization
The work introduces a chart-to-dictionary auxiliary task paired with Program-of-Thoughts prompting to enable zero-shot chart summarization that matches existing methods on semantic and factual metrics.
-
SafeAlign-VLA: A Negative-Enhanced Safe Alignment Framework for Risk-Aware Autonomous Driving
SafeAlign-VLA uses counterfactual safety pairing and anchor-based group relative policy optimization to incorporate negative data for safer VLA-based autonomous driving.
-
From Where Things Are to What They Are For: Benchmarking Spatial-Functional Intelligence in Multimodal LLMs
SFI-Bench shows current multimodal LLMs struggle to integrate spatial memory with functional reasoning and external knowledge in video tasks.
-
Beyond Chain-of-Thought: Rewrite as a Universal Interface for Generative Multimodal Embeddings
Using a structured rewrite instead of CoT as the generative interface improves MLLM-based multimodal embedding performance while cutting thinking tokens by about half.
-
HypEHR: Hyperbolic Modeling of Electronic Health Records for Efficient Question Answering
A 22M-parameter hyperbolic model answers structured EHR questions with accuracy close to LLM-based systems (EHRXQA 89.5%, MIMIC-Instr 76.0%).
-
Towards Robust Endogenous Reasoning: Unifying Drift Adaptation in Non-Stationary Tuning
CPO++ adapts reinforcement fine-tuning of MLLMs to endogenous multi-modal concept drift through counterfactual reasoning and preference optimization, yielding better coherence and cross-domain robustness in safety-critical settings.
-
AgroCoT: A Chain-of-Thought Benchmark for Evaluating Reasoning in Vision-Language Models for Agriculture
AgroCoT is a new Chain-of-Thought VQA benchmark with 4759 samples to evaluate reasoning capabilities of vision-language models in agriculture.
-
RadAgents: Multimodal Agentic Reasoning for Chest X-ray Interpretation with Radiologist-like Workflows
RadAgents is a multi-agent framework coupling clinical priors with task-aware multimodal reasoning and radiologist-like workflows, plus grounding and retrieval-augmentation for conflict resolution in chest X-ray interpretation.
-
A Survey of Audio Reasoning in Multimodal Foundation Models
A survey that provides a unified formulation of audio reasoning and reviews advances across Audio-to-Text, Audio-to-Speech, Audio-Visual, and Agentic paradigms while discussing challenges and future directions.
- Reasoning Dynamics and the Limits of Monitoring Modality Reliance in Vision-Language Models
- Collaborative Multi-Agent Scripts Generation for Enhancing Imperfect-Information Reasoning in Murder Mystery Games