CiteVQA requires models to cite specific document regions with bounding boxes alongside answers and finds that even the strongest MLLMs frequently cite the wrong region, with top SAA scores of only 76.0 for closed models and 22.5 for open-source ones.
hub Mixed citations
Thyme: Think Beyond Images
Mixed citation behavior. Most common role is background (53%).
abstract
Following OpenAI's introduction of the ``thinking with images'' concept, recent efforts have explored stimulating the use of visual information in the reasoning process to enhance model performance in perception and reasoning tasks. However, to the best of our knowledge, no open-source work currently offers a feature set as rich as proprietary models (O3), which can perform diverse image manipulations and simultaneously enhance logical reasoning capabilities through code. In this paper, we make a preliminary attempt in this direction by introducing Thyme (Think Beyond Images), a novel paradigm for enabling MLLMs to transcend existing ``think with images'' approaches by autonomously generating and executing diverse image processing and computational operations via executable code. This approach not only facilitates a rich, on-the-fly set of image manipulations (e.g., cropping, rotation, contrast enhancement) but also allows for mathematical computations, all while maintaining high autonomy in deciding when and how to apply these operations. We activate this capability through a two-stage training strategy: an initial SFT on a curated dataset of 500K samples to teach code generation, followed by a RL phase to refine decision-making. For the RL stage, we manually collect and design high-resolution question-answer pairs to increase the learning difficulty, and we propose GRPO-ATS (Group Relative Policy Optimization with Adaptive Temperature Sampling), an algorithm that applies distinct temperatures to text and code generation to balance reasoning exploration with code execution precision. We conduct extensive experimental analysis and ablation studies. Comprehensive evaluations on nearly 20 benchmarks show that Thyme yields significant and consistent performance gains, particularly in challenging high-resolution perception and complex reasoning tasks.
hub tools
citation-role summary
citation-polarity summary
representative citing papers
S1-VL combines structured scientific reasoning with iterative image manipulation via code execution to reach state-of-the-art results on visual and scientific reasoning benchmarks.
EVE enables verifiable self-evolution of MLLMs by using a Challenger-Solver architecture to generate dynamic executable visual transformations that produce VQA problems with absolute execution-verified ground truth.
P2R decouples perception from reasoning in VLMs via a two-stage process and PRA-GRPO alternating RL training, reporting gains such as 93.2% on V-Star for the 4B model over its Qwen3-VL backbone.
Static SFT and RL training for tool-use agents leads to performance drops under open-world distributional shifts across perception, interaction, reasoning and internalization; perturbation-augmented fine-tuning is proposed as mitigation.
DiCoBench is a new high-resolution multi-image benchmark exposing large gaps between top MLLMs and human performance (98.3%) on differential and commonality visual cue perception.
SpatialWorld is a new multi-simulator benchmark showing top multimodal agents achieve under 18% success on interactive spatial tasks requiring active exploration and long-horizon planning.
Astra couples an RL-trained VLM policy with a view-consistent Bagel-based world simulator to enable agentic imagination during spatial reasoning, yielding benchmark gains on MMSI-Bench and MindCube.
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.
A decoupled question-conditioned image editor trained via supervised imitation then VLM-reward enhancement improves MLLM visual reasoning Pass@1 by 4.6-5.5 points across models and tasks.
V-ABS is an action-observer beam search method with entropy-based adaptive weighting and an 80k-sample SFT dataset that delivers 19.7% average gains on visual reasoning tasks for MLLMs.
VT-Bench aggregates 14 datasets from 9 domains and evaluates 23 models to standardize visual-tabular discriminative and generative tasks.
Perceval is a perception-centric PRM that detects token-level perceptual errors in VLMs, supporting token-advantage RL training and iterative test-time scaling for improved reasoning.
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.
SynthFun3D generates synthetic 3D functionality segmentation data from action descriptions via object retrieval and scene arrangement, yielding consistent gains of +2.2 mAP, +6.3 mAR, and +5.7 mIoU when augmenting real data for VLM training.
BUS trains VLMs for self-reflection without labels by verifying which sampled reasonings precede their own answers via backward prediction, improving multimodal reasoning.
Scene-graph-aligned SFT plus node-as-proxy GRPO rewards let small MLLMs outperform larger baselines on fine-grained visual reasoning tasks.
PixelEyes decouples reasoning and perception via mask-guided search and semantic BFS, introduces PixelEyes-6K dataset and Pinpoint-Bench benchmark, and open-sources code and models.
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.
AXPO addresses the Thinking-Acting Gap in agentic RL training by targeted resampling of tool calls in all-wrong subgroups, delivering +1.8pp gains over GRPO on nine multimodal benchmarks with an 8B model beating a 32B baseline on Pass@4.
InterSketch improves long-horizon visual-textual chain-of-thought in VLMs by dynamically generating and interleaving self-correcting visual sketches with text, using a synthesized dataset plus reflection in cold-start followed by stepwise-reward RL, and reports outperforming Gemini-3-Pro on benchmar
Maestro uses outcome-based RL to train a lightweight policy that orchestrates ensembles of frozen expert models and skills, reporting 70.1% average accuracy across ten multimodal benchmarks and outperforming GPT-5 and Gemini-2.5-Pro while generalizing to unseen components.
AutoTool uses dual-mode RL to let MLLMs adaptively choose tool use or text-only reasoning, reporting 21.8% accuracy gain on V* and 44.9% efficiency gain on POPE versus baselines.
Vision-OPD transfers an MLLM's privileged regional perception to its full-image policy through on-policy token-level self-distillation, yielding competitive results on fine-grained visual benchmarks.
citing papers explorer
-
CiteVQA: Benchmarking Evidence Attribution for Trustworthy Document Intelligence
CiteVQA requires models to cite specific document regions with bounding boxes alongside answers and finds that even the strongest MLLMs frequently cite the wrong region, with top SAA scores of only 76.0 for closed models and 22.5 for open-source ones.
-
S1-VL: Scientific Multimodal Reasoning Model with Thinking-with-Images
S1-VL combines structured scientific reasoning with iterative image manipulation via code execution to reach state-of-the-art results on visual and scientific reasoning benchmarks.
-
EVE: Verifiable Self-Evolution of MLLMs via Executable Visual Transformations
EVE enables verifiable self-evolution of MLLMs by using a Challenger-Solver architecture to generate dynamic executable visual transformations that produce VQA problems with absolute execution-verified ground truth.
-
Perceive-to-Reason: Decoupling Perception and Reasoning for Fine-Grained Visual Reasoning
P2R decouples perception from reasoning in VLMs via a two-stage process and PRA-GRPO alternating RL training, reporting gains such as 93.2% on V-Star for the 4B model over its Qwen3-VL backbone.
-
Can Agents Generalize to the Open World? Unveiling the Fragility of Static Training in Tool Use
Static SFT and RL training for tool-use agents leads to performance drops under open-world distributional shifts across perception, interaction, reasoning and internalization; perturbation-augmented fine-tuning is proposed as mitigation.
-
DiCoBench: Benchmarking Multi-Image Fine-Grained Perception via Differential and Commonality Visual Cues
DiCoBench is a new high-resolution multi-image benchmark exposing large gaps between top MLLMs and human performance (98.3%) on differential and commonality visual cue perception.
-
SpatialWorld: Benchmarking Interactive Spatial Reasoning of Multimodal Agents in Real-World Tasks
SpatialWorld is a new multi-simulator benchmark showing top multimodal agents achieve under 18% success on interactive spatial tasks requiring active exploration and long-horizon planning.
-
Thinking with Imagination: Agentic Visual Spatial Reasoning with World Simulators
Astra couples an RL-trained VLM policy with a view-consistent Bagel-based world simulator to enable agentic imagination during spatial reasoning, yielding benchmark gains on MMSI-Bench and MindCube.
-
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.
-
ETCHR: Editing To Clarify and Harness Reasoning
A decoupled question-conditioned image editor trained via supervised imitation then VLM-reward enhancement improves MLLM visual reasoning Pass@1 by 4.6-5.5 points across models and tasks.
-
V-ABS: Action-Observer Driven Beam Search for Dynamic Visual Reasoning
V-ABS is an action-observer beam search method with entropy-based adaptive weighting and an 80k-sample SFT dataset that delivers 19.7% average gains on visual reasoning tasks for MLLMs.
-
VT-Bench: A Unified Benchmark for Visual-Tabular Multi-Modal Learning
VT-Bench aggregates 14 datasets from 9 domains and evaluates 23 models to standardize visual-tabular discriminative and generative tasks.
-
Improving Vision-language Models with Perception-centric Process Reward Models
Perceval is a perception-centric PRM that detects token-level perceptual errors in VLMs, supporting token-advantage RL training and iterative test-time scaling for improved reasoning.
-
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.
-
Action-guided generation of 3D functionality segmentation data
SynthFun3D generates synthetic 3D functionality segmentation data from action descriptions via object retrieval and scene arrangement, yielding consistent gains of +2.2 mAP, +6.3 mAR, and +5.7 mIoU when augmenting real data for VLM training.
-
BUS: Brain-Inspired Unsupervised Self-Reflection via Backward Prediction for Multimodal Reasoning
BUS trains VLMs for self-reflection without labels by verifying which sampled reasonings precede their own answers via backward prediction, improving multimodal reasoning.
-
Scene Graph Thinking: Reinforcing Structured Visual Reasoning for Multimodal Large Language Models
Scene-graph-aligned SFT plus node-as-proxy GRPO rewards let small MLLMs outperform larger baselines on fine-grained visual reasoning tasks.
-
PixelEyes: Decoupling Perception and Reasoning for Pinpoint Visual Evidence Seeking
PixelEyes decouples reasoning and perception via mask-guided search and semantic BFS, introduces PixelEyes-6K dataset and Pinpoint-Bench benchmark, and open-sources code and models.
-
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.
-
Agent Explorative Policy Optimization for Multimodal Agentic Reasoning
AXPO addresses the Thinking-Acting Gap in agentic RL training by targeted resampling of tool calls in all-wrong subgroups, delivering +1.8pp gains over GRPO on nine multimodal benchmarks with an 8B model beating a 32B baseline on Pass@4.
-
InterSketch: An Interleaved Reasoning Model with Self-correcting Visual Sketch and Stepwise Reward
InterSketch improves long-horizon visual-textual chain-of-thought in VLMs by dynamically generating and interleaving self-correcting visual sketches with text, using a synthesized dataset plus reflection in cold-start followed by stepwise-reward RL, and reports outperforming Gemini-3-Pro on benchmar
-
Maestro: Reinforcement Learning to Orchestrate Hierarchical Model-Skill Ensembles
Maestro uses outcome-based RL to train a lightweight policy that orchestrates ensembles of frozen expert models and skills, reporting 70.1% average accuracy across ten multimodal benchmarks and outperforming GPT-5 and Gemini-2.5-Pro while generalizing to unseen components.
-
Are Tools Always Beneficial? Learning to Invoke Tools Adaptively for Dual-Mode Multimodal LLM Reasoning
AutoTool uses dual-mode RL to let MLLMs adaptively choose tool use or text-only reasoning, reporting 21.8% accuracy gain on V* and 44.9% efficiency gain on POPE versus baselines.
-
Vision-OPD: Learning to See Fine Details for Multimodal LLMs via On-Policy Self-Distillation
Vision-OPD transfers an MLLM's privileged regional perception to its full-image policy through on-policy token-level self-distillation, yielding competitive results on fine-grained visual benchmarks.
-
Leveraging Latent Visual Reasoning in Silence
Latent visual reasoning improves multimodal models via training effects even without using latent tokens at inference, enabled by an attention-based RL reward that promotes interaction with text tokens.
-
Starve to Perceive: Taming Lazy Perception in VLMs with Constrained Visual Bandwidth
Constraining visual token budgets during SFT and RL forces VLMs to learn functional active perception, yielding ~5% relative gains and strong transfer to unconstrained evaluation.
-
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.
-
SIEVES: Selective Prediction Generalizes through Visual Evidence Scoring
SIEVES improves selective prediction coverage by up to 3x on OOD VQA benchmarks by training a selector to score the quality of visual evidence produced by reasoner models, generalizing across benchmarks and proprietary models without internal access or per-task retraining.
-
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.
-
Agent-World: Scaling Real-World Environment Synthesis for Evolving General Agent Intelligence
Agent-World autonomously synthesizes verifiable real-world tasks and uses continuous self-evolution to train 8B and 14B agents that outperform proprietary models on 23 benchmarks.
-
E3VS-Bench: A Benchmark for Viewpoint-Dependent Active Perception in 3D Gaussian Splatting Scenes
E3VS-Bench is a 99-scene, 2,014-episode benchmark using 3D Gaussian Splatting to evaluate whether VLMs can actively control 5-DoF viewpoints to gather visual evidence for question answering.
-
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.
-
Test-time Scaling over Perception: Resolving the Grounding Paradox in Thinking with Images
TTSP samples and filters multiple zoom-in exploration traces and iteratively consolidates validated observations into an Evidence Ledger, improving fine-grained multimodal reasoning on V* Bench, HR-Bench, TreeBench, and MME-RealWorld-Lite.
-
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.
-
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.
-
LAST: Leveraging Tools as Hints to Enhance Spatial Reasoning for Multimodal Large Language Models
LAST augments MLLMs with a tool-abstraction sandbox and three-stage training to deliver around 20% gains on spatial reasoning tasks, outperforming closed-source models.
-
CharTool: Tool-Integrated Visual Reasoning for Chart Understanding
CharTool equips MLLMs with cropping and code tools plus agentic RL on DuoChart data to raise chart-reasoning accuracy by up to 9.78 percent on benchmarks.
-
MapTab: A Diagnostic Benchmark for Long-Horizon Multi-Criteria Multimodal Reasoning on Heterogeneous Topological Graphs
MapTab introduces a 328-map, 196,800-query benchmark showing that current multimodal LLMs fall far short on multi-criteria route planning from maps-plus-tables.
-
AdaTooler-V: Adaptive Tool-Use for Images and Videos
AdaTooler-V trains MLLMs to adaptively use vision tools via AT-GRPO reinforcement learning and new datasets, reaching 89.8% on V* and outperforming GPT-4o.
-
Skyra: AI-Generated Video Detection via Grounded Artifact Reasoning
Skyra is an MLLM that detects AI-generated videos by identifying and reasoning over grounded visual artifacts, supported by a new annotated dataset and benchmark.
-
DeepEyesV2: Toward Agentic Multimodal Model
DeepEyesV2 uses a two-stage cold-start plus reinforcement learning pipeline to produce an agentic multimodal model that adaptively invokes tools and outperforms direct RL on real-world reasoning benchmarks.
-
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.
-
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.
-
CaptchaMind: Training CAPTCHA Solvers via Reinforcement Learning with Explicit Reasoning Supervision
Presents CaptchaBench benchmark and CaptchaMind RL solver achieving 82.9% success on benchmark tasks and 71% on real-world CAPTCHAs via explicit reasoning process supervision.
-
Perceptual Flow Network for Visually Grounded Reasoning
PFlowNet decouples perception from reasoning, integrates multi-dimensional rewards with vicinal geometric shaping via variational RL, and reports new SOTA results on V* Bench (90.6%) and MME-RealWorld-lite (67.0%).
-
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.
-
S1-Omni-Image: A Unified Model for Scientific Image Understanding, Generation, and Editing
S1-Omni-Image unifies scientific image understanding, generation and editing via a think-before-generate paradigm on top of S1-VL-32B, trained on a 314K-sample SciGenEdit dataset, and reports SOTA results on multiple generation and editing benchmarks.
-
Kwai Keye-VL-2.0 Technical Report
Kwai Keye-VL-2.0-30B-A3B is a 30B MoE model with 3B active parameters using DSA adaptation and MOPD distillation that reports SOTA results on video understanding and agent benchmarks.
-
Beyond NL2Code: A Structured Survey of Multimodal Code Intelligence
A structured survey of multimodal code intelligence that formulates the field by code roles and organizes work into four domains while proposing verification-centered research directions.
- MCMit: Hardware-Software Co-Design for Mid-Circuit Measurement Error Mitigation