Future-L1 interleaves latent visual spans with text in MLLM decoding, trained on a custom Future-L1-50K dataset via LA-DAPO RL, and reports SOTA gains on FutureBench (61.0 to 85.4) and TwiFF-Bench (2.44 to 3.04).
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Latent Visual Reasoning
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abstract
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved notable gains in various tasks by incorporating Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning in language spaces. Recent work extends this direction by leveraging external tools for visual editing, thereby enhancing the visual signal along the reasoning trajectories. Nevertheless, these approaches remain fundamentally constrained: reasoning is still confined to the language space, with visual information treated as static preconditions. We introduce Latent Visual Reasoning (LVR), a new paradigm that enables autoregressive reasoning directly in the visual embedding space. A visual encoder first projects images into visual tokens within a joint semantic space shared with the language model. The language model is then trained to generate latent states that reconstruct key visual tokens critical for answering the query, constituting the process of latent visual reasoning. By interleaving LVR with standard text generation, our model achieves substantial gains on perception-intensive visual question answering tasks. In addition, we adapt the GRPO algorithm to conduct reinforcement learning on latent reasoning, further balancing LVR and textual generation. We show that LVR substantially improves fine-grained visual understanding and perception, achieving 71.67% on MMVP compared to 66.67% with Qwen2.5-VL. Code base and model weights will be released later.
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representative citing papers
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.
STORM teaches LVLMs to internalize spatial-temporal reasoning via bounded latent trajectories trained with generated thought videos in two stages, improving accuracy on VideoMME, MVBench and similar benchmarks while lowering inference overhead.
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.
ATLAS uses a single functional token to unify agentic and latent visual reasoning without image generation or external execution.
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.
4DThinker enables VLMs to perform dynamic spatial reasoning by thinking with 4D latent mental imagery using new fine-tuning and reinforcement learning methods.
V-Reflection introduces a think-then-look mechanism where MLLM latent states actively interrogate visual features via two-stage distillation from a box-guided teacher to a dynamic autoregressive student, narrowing the fine-grained perception gap on benchmarks.
S²GR adds stepwise thinking tokens with contrastive supervision on codebook clusters to balance computational focus and ground reasoning paths in generative recommendation.
Laser reformulates visual reasoning via Dynamic Windowed Alignment Learning to maintain latent superposition of global features, delivering 5.03% average gains over Monet and over 97% fewer inference tokens on six benchmarks.
LCDrive unifies chain-of-thought reasoning and action selection for end-to-end driving by interleaving action-proposal tokens and latent world-model tokens that predict action outcomes, yielding faster inference and better trajectories than text-based or non-reasoning baselines.
VisReflect generates continuous latent visual reflections to emphasize relevant visual features and guide attention in LVLMs, yielding 4.1% gains on image benchmarks and 1.8% on video benchmarks with 44% less inference time than zooming methods.
MUSE is a unified agentic harness that improves off-the-shelf MLLMs on visual spatial planning, perception, multimodal reasoning, and fine-grained discrimination benchmarks through structured execution modules and verifier-guided repair without model retraining.
Latent Action Control learns unobserved action trajectories via variational alignment and GRPO to inject reasoning into flow-based image generation, yielding gains on compositional benchmarks.
SCOLAR fixes information gain collapse in latent visual reasoning by generating independent auxiliary visual tokens via a detransformer, extending acceptable CoT length over 30x and delivering +14.12% gains on reasoning benchmarks.
CoWorld-VLA extracts semantic, geometric, dynamic, and trajectory expert tokens from multi-source supervision and feeds them into a diffusion-based hierarchical planner, achieving competitive collision avoidance and trajectory accuracy on the NAVSIM v1 benchmark.
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.
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.
Visual replay module and adaptive depth scaling improve multimodal latent reasoning, reaching SOTA benchmarks with faster inference than explicit chain-of-thought methods.
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.
Q-Zoom achieves up to 4.39x inference speedup in high-resolution MLLM scenarios via query-aware gating and region localization, matching or exceeding baseline accuracy on document and high-res benchmarks.
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.
SLVR is a two-stage method that enriches region-centric latent representations with fine-grained attribute semantics and aligns them via M-GRPO across multiple queries on the same region, supported by new SLV-Set dataset and SV-QA benchmark.
Latent visual reasoning fails in current models because standard datasets make oracle latents uninformative and inference-time latents collapse away from useful representations.
citing papers explorer
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Imagine Before You Predict: Interleaved Latent Visual Reasoning for Video Event Prediction
Future-L1 interleaves latent visual spans with text in MLLM decoding, trained on a custom Future-L1-50K dataset via LA-DAPO RL, and reports SOTA gains on FutureBench (61.0 to 85.4) and TwiFF-Bench (2.44 to 3.04).
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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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STORM: Internalized Modeling for Spatial-Temporal Reasoning in Video-Language Models
STORM teaches LVLMs to internalize spatial-temporal reasoning via bounded latent trajectories trained with generated thought videos in two stages, improving accuracy on VideoMME, MVBench and similar benchmarks while lowering inference overhead.
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ATLAS: Agentic or Latent Visual Reasoning? One Word is Enough for Both
ATLAS uses a single functional token to unify agentic and latent visual reasoning without image generation or external execution.
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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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4DThinker: Thinking with 4D Imagery for Dynamic Spatial Understanding
4DThinker enables VLMs to perform dynamic spatial reasoning by thinking with 4D latent mental imagery using new fine-tuning and reinforcement learning methods.
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V-Reflection: Transforming MLLMs from Passive Observers to Active Interrogators
V-Reflection introduces a think-then-look mechanism where MLLM latent states actively interrogate visual features via two-stage distillation from a box-guided teacher to a dynamic autoregressive student, narrowing the fine-grained perception gap on benchmarks.
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Latent Chain-of-Thought World Modeling for End-to-End Driving
LCDrive unifies chain-of-thought reasoning and action selection for end-to-end driving by interleaving action-proposal tokens and latent world-model tokens that predict action outcomes, yielding faster inference and better trajectories than text-based or non-reasoning baselines.
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VisReflect: Latent Visual Reflection for Fine-Grained Perception in Long Visual Context
VisReflect generates continuous latent visual reflections to emphasize relevant visual features and guide attention in LVLMs, yielding 4.1% gains on image benchmarks and 1.8% on video benchmarks with 44% less inference time than zooming methods.
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MUSE: A Unified Agentic Harness for MLLMs
MUSE is a unified agentic harness that improves off-the-shelf MLLMs on visual spatial planning, perception, multimodal reasoning, and fine-grained discrimination benchmarks through structured execution modules and verifier-guided repair without model retraining.
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Latent Action Control for Reasoning-Guided Unified Image Generation
Latent Action Control learns unobserved action trajectories via variational alignment and GRPO to inject reasoning into flow-based image generation, yielding gains on compositional benchmarks.
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Self-Consistent Latent Reasoning: Long Latent Sequence Reasoning for Vision-Language Model
SCOLAR fixes information gain collapse in latent visual reasoning by generating independent auxiliary visual tokens via a detransformer, extending acceptable CoT length over 30x and delivering +14.12% gains on reasoning benchmarks.
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CoWorld-VLA: Thinking in a Multi-Expert World Model for Autonomous Driving
CoWorld-VLA extracts semantic, geometric, dynamic, and trajectory expert tokens from multi-source supervision and feeds them into a diffusion-based hierarchical planner, achieving competitive collision avoidance and trajectory accuracy on the NAVSIM v1 benchmark.
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Visual Enhanced Depth Scaling for Multimodal Latent Reasoning
Visual replay module and adaptive depth scaling improve multimodal latent reasoning, reaching SOTA benchmarks with faster inference than explicit chain-of-thought methods.
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Q-Zoom: Query-Aware Adaptive Perception for Efficient Multimodal Large Language Models
Q-Zoom achieves up to 4.39x inference speedup in high-resolution MLLM scenarios via query-aware gating and region localization, matching or exceeding baseline accuracy on document and high-res benchmarks.
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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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Semantic-Enriched Latent Visual Reasoning
SLVR is a two-stage method that enriches region-centric latent representations with fine-grained attribute semantics and aligns them via M-GRPO across multiple queries on the same region, supported by new SLV-Set dataset and SV-QA benchmark.
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What's Holding Back Latent Visual Reasoning?
Latent visual reasoning fails in current models because standard datasets make oracle latents uninformative and inference-time latents collapse away from useful representations.
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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.
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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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MedLVR: Latent Visual Reasoning for Reliable Medical Visual Question Answering
MedLVR interleaves latent visual reasoning segments in autoregressive decoding and uses two-stage training to raise average medical VQA accuracy from 48.3% to 53.4% over a Qwen2.5-VL-7B backbone on OmniMedVQA and five other benchmarks.
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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.
- HyLaR: Hybrid Latent Reasoning with Decoupled Policy Optimization