Variable-length autoregressive latent sequences, trained as variational inference with a PPO-style objective, give robot policies adaptive test-time compute and yield a reusable action tokenizer.
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Machine Mental Imagery: Empower Multimodal Reasoning with Latent Visual Tokens
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abstract
Vision-language models (VLMs) excel at multimodal understanding, yet their text-only decoding forces them to verbalize visual reasoning, limiting performance on tasks that demand visual imagination. Recent attempts train VLMs to render explicit images, but the heavy image-generation pre-training often hinders the reasoning ability. Inspired by the way humans reason with mental imagery-the internal construction and manipulation of visual cues-we investigate whether VLMs can reason through interleaved multimodal trajectories without producing explicit images. To this end, we present a Machine Mental Imagery framework, dubbed as Mirage, which augments VLM decoding with latent visual tokens alongside ordinary text. Concretely, whenever the model chooses to ``think visually'', it recasts its hidden states as next tokens, thereby continuing a multimodal trajectory without generating pixel-level images. Begin by supervising the latent tokens through distillation from ground-truth image embeddings, we then switch to text-only supervision to make the latent trajectory align tightly with the task objective. A subsequent reinforcement learning stage further enhances the multimodal reasoning capability. Experiments on diverse benchmarks demonstrate that Mirage unlocks stronger multimodal reasoning without explicit image generation.
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DLR creates discrete latent tokens from rendered CoT images via clustering, enabling up to 20x compression and interpretable trajectories that outperform continuous latent baselines on reasoning tasks.
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).
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.
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.
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.
CoLVR uses latent contrastive objectives with angle-based perturbation and RL trajectory rewards to increase exploratory visual reasoning in MLLMs, delivering 5-8% gains on VSP, Jigsaw, and MMStar benchmarks.
RL post-training on hallucination-forced multimodal data improves reasoning performance and can outperform standard training.
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.
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.
A VLM planner that adaptively inserts latent visual thoughts of future states into its reasoning trace beats language-only and prior VLM planners on long-horizon kitchen tasks, especially under tight free space.
AMVL applies bidirectional KL calibration to align answer-agnostic prior with answer-conditioned posterior in variational multimodal reasoning, reducing leakage and yielding +10.83 average gain on BLINK benchmark.
Lens purifies visual evidence in MLLMs via question-conditioned latent noise masking with a LET token, yielding 2.4-6.4 point gains on VQA and grounding tasks.
CVSBench benchmark shows VLMs struggle with cross-view spatial consistency but improve substantially when given 3D scene imagination inputs.
IPT supervision improves spatial reasoning in VLMs on perspective taking, path tracing, and multiview counting tasks, often outperforming textual chain-of-thought while remaining consistent with observed inputs.
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.
ReGuLaR is a relation-grounded latent reasoning method for LVLMs that trains with a ReGFormer on a new RGROUNDING-351K dataset to achieve SOTA benchmark performance while running without the module at inference.
HyLaR interleaves discrete text generation with continuous visual latent representations and optimizes them via a decoupled RL algorithm using vMF distributions, improving fine-grained visual reasoning.
LLMs achieve higher accuracy than humans on compositional imagery tasks previously argued to require pictorial representations, supporting emergent propositional mental imagery in AI.
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.
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.
LaST-R1 introduces a RL post-training method called LAPO that optimizes latent Chain-of-Thought reasoning in vision-language-action models, yielding 99.9% success on LIBERO and up to 22.5% real-world gains.
citing papers explorer
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Latent Memory Palace: Reasoning for Control as Autoregressive Variational Inference
Variable-length autoregressive latent sequences, trained as variational inference with a PPO-style objective, give robot policies adaptive test-time compute and yield a reusable action tokenizer.
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Why Struggle with Continuous Latents? Interpretable Discrete Latent Reasoning via Rendered Compression
DLR creates discrete latent tokens from rendered CoT images via clustering, enabling up to 20x compression and interpretable trajectories that outperform continuous latent baselines on reasoning tasks.
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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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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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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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CoLVR: Enhancing Exploratory Latent Visual Reasoning via Contrastive Optimization
CoLVR uses latent contrastive objectives with angle-based perturbation and RL trajectory rewards to increase exploratory visual reasoning in MLLMs, delivering 5-8% gains on VSP, Jigsaw, and MMStar benchmarks.
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Understanding the Role of Hallucination in Reinforcement Post-Training of Multimodal Reasoning Models
RL post-training on hallucination-forced multimodal data improves reasoning performance and can outperform standard training.
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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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Forest Before Trees: Latent Superposition for Efficient Visual Reasoning
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.
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APIVOT: Adaptive Planning with Interleaved Vision-Language Thoughts
A VLM planner that adaptively inserts latent visual thoughts of future states into its reasoning trace beats language-only and prior VLM planners on long-horizon kitchen tasks, especially under tight free space.
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Multimodal Continuous Reasoning via Asymmetric Mutual Variational Learning
AMVL applies bidirectional KL calibration to align answer-agnostic prior with answer-conditioned posterior in variational multimodal reasoning, reducing leakage and yielding +10.83 average gain on BLINK benchmark.
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Latent Noise Mask for Reducing Visual Redundancy in Multimodal Large Language Models
Lens purifies visual evidence in MLLMs via question-conditioned latent noise masking with a LET token, yielding 2.4-6.4 point gains on VQA and grounding tasks.
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CVSBench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Cross-view Spatial Reasoning and Dreaming
CVSBench benchmark shows VLMs struggle with cross-view spatial consistency but improve substantially when given 3D scene imagination inputs.
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Imaginative Perception Tokens Enhance Spatial Reasoning in Multimodal Language Models
IPT supervision improves spatial reasoning in VLMs on perspective taking, path tracing, and multiview counting tasks, often outperforming textual chain-of-thought while remaining consistent with observed inputs.
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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.
-
ReGuLaR: Relation-Grounded Latent Reasoning for Large Vision-Language Models
ReGuLaR is a relation-grounded latent reasoning method for LVLMs that trains with a ReGFormer on a new RGROUNDING-351K dataset to achieve SOTA benchmark performance while running without the module at inference.
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HyLaR: Hybrid Latent Reasoning with Decoupled Policy Optimization
HyLaR interleaves discrete text generation with continuous visual latent representations and optimizes them via a decoupled RL algorithm using vMF distributions, improving fine-grained visual reasoning.
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Artificial Phantasia: Emergent Mental Imagery in Large Language Models
LLMs achieve higher accuracy than humans on compositional imagery tasks previously argued to require pictorial representations, supporting emergent propositional mental imagery in AI.
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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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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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LaST-R1: Reinforcing Robotic Manipulation via Adaptive Physical Latent Reasoning
LaST-R1 introduces a RL post-training method called LAPO that optimizes latent Chain-of-Thought reasoning in vision-language-action models, yielding 99.9% success on LIBERO and up to 22.5% real-world gains.
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Using Machine Mental Imagery for Representing Common Ground in Situated Dialogue
Incremental visual scaffolding using multimodal models improves persistent common ground representation in situated dialogue by reducing representational blur compared to text-only approaches, with hybrid text-visual yielding best results on the IndiRef benchmark.
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Don't Show Pixels, Show Cues: Unlocking Visual Tool Reasoning in Language Models via Perception Programs
Perception Programs rewrite dense visual tool outputs into language-native summaries, boosting MLLM accuracy by 15-45% absolute on BLINK perception tasks and setting new state-of-the-art results.
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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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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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V-Zero: Answer-Label-Free On-Policy Distillation with Contrastive Evidence Gating for Fine-Grained Visual Reasoning
V-Zero trains MLLMs for visual reasoning without answer labels by gating on-policy distillation trajectories using contrastive evidence from relevant versus negative image crops.
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Latent Visual States for Efficient Multimodal Reasoning
EVA generates adaptive Latent_slot tokens as internal visual thoughts, trained end-to-end with text tokens via D-GSPO on the EVA-230K dataset, claiming performance gains and better inference efficiency.
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UniCanvas: A Diffusion-base Unified Model for Text-in-Image Joint Generation
UniCanvas introduces a diffusion-based approach for unified multimodal generation by embedding text as visual patterns within images on a shared canvas.
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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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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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Decompose, Look, and Reason: Reinforced Latent Reasoning for VLMs
DLR is a new reinforced latent reasoning method for VLMs that decomposes queries, uses continuous visual latents, and outperforms text-only and multimodal CoT baselines on vision-centric benchmarks with better interpretability.
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Towards Explainable Industrial Anomaly Detection via Knowledge-Guided Latent Reasoning
Reason-IAD improves explainable industrial anomaly detection by combining retrieval-augmented category knowledge with entropy-guided latent reasoning and dynamic visual patch injection in MLLMs.