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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Multimodal Chain-of-Thought Reasoning: A Comprehensive Survey
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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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
VLMs show answer inertia in CoT reasoning and remain influenced by misleading textual cues even with sufficient visual evidence, making CoT an incomplete window into modality reliance.
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.
SafeAlign-VLA uses counterfactual safety pairing and anchor-based group relative policy optimization to incorporate negative data for safer VLA-based autonomous driving.
SFI-Bench shows current multimodal LLMs struggle to integrate spatial memory with functional reasoning and external knowledge in video tasks.
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.
A multi-agent system creates role-specific murder mystery scripts and applies chain-of-thought fine-tuning plus GRPO reinforcement learning to improve VLMs' multi-hop reasoning under uncertainty and deception.
AgroCoT is a new Chain-of-Thought VQA benchmark with 4759 samples to evaluate reasoning capabilities of vision-language models in agriculture.
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.
citing papers explorer
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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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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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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.
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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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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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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.
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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.
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Reasoning Dynamics and the Limits of Monitoring Modality Reliance in Vision-Language Models
VLMs show answer inertia in CoT reasoning and remain influenced by misleading textual cues even with sufficient visual evidence, making CoT an incomplete window into modality reliance.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Collaborative Multi-Agent Scripts Generation for Enhancing Imperfect-Information Reasoning in Murder Mystery Games
A multi-agent system creates role-specific murder mystery scripts and applies chain-of-thought fine-tuning plus GRPO reinforcement learning to improve VLMs' multi-hop reasoning under uncertainty and deception.
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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.
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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.
- Beyond Chain-of-Thought: Rewrite as a Universal Interface for Generative Multimodal Embeddings