Optical reasoning encodes rationales in images rather than text, matching or exceeding text-based performance on math, science, and multimodal benchmarks while cutting tokens by 28.57% on language tasks and 16% on multimodal tasks.
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Imagine while Reasoning in Space: Multimodal Visualization-of-Thought
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abstract
Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has proven highly effective for enhancing complex reasoning in Large Language Models (LLMs) and Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). Yet, it struggles in complex spatial reasoning tasks. Nonetheless, human cognition extends beyond language alone, enabling the remarkable capability to think in both words and images. Inspired by this mechanism, we propose a new reasoning paradigm, Multimodal Visualization-of-Thought (MVoT). It enables visual thinking in MLLMs by generating image visualizations of their reasoning traces. To ensure high-quality visualization, we introduce token discrepancy loss into autoregressive MLLMs. This innovation significantly improves both visual coherence and fidelity. We validate this approach through several dynamic spatial reasoning tasks. Experimental results reveal that MVoT demonstrates competitive performance across tasks. Moreover, it exhibits robust and reliable improvements in the most challenging scenarios where CoT fails. Ultimately, MVoT establishes new possibilities for complex reasoning tasks where visual thinking can effectively complement verbal reasoning.
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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.
Formalizes Reasoning Portability (RP) and proposes RDB-CL to modulate per-sample KL regularization in RLVR for MLLM continual learning, achieving +12.0% Last accuracy over vanilla RLVR baseline by preserving reusable reasoning on high-RP samples.
ATLAS uses a single functional token to unify agentic and latent visual reasoning without image generation or external execution.
UniPath adaptively models coordination-path diversity in unified multimodal models by training a path-conditioned executor and using a lightweight planner for input-dependent selection, improving performance over fixed strategies.
SketchVLM lets VLMs generate non-destructive SVG annotations on input images to visually explain answers, raising visual reasoning accuracy by up to 28.5 points and annotation quality by 1.48x over baselines.
Omni-R1 unifies multimodal reasoning by generating intermediate images during the process in a SFT-plus-RL framework, with an Omni-R1-Zero variant that matches or exceeds it using only text data.
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.
Latent Visual Reasoning enables autoregressive generation of latent visual states that reconstruct critical image tokens, yielding gains on perception-heavy VQA benchmarks such as 71.67% on MMVP.
Fine-tuning a video generator on a new 17K reasoning-video dataset improves Chain-of-Frame reasoning, and adding learnable visual/textual reasoning tokens yields further gains on external 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.
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.
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.
SceneDiver introduces a coarse-to-fine focus plan generation approach for VLMs that constructs holistic scene graphs then iteratively decomposes tasks, plus a distillation adapter for VLAs, to reduce visual hallucinations in embodied AI benchmarks.
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
VLMs fail to ground numerical values in spatial perception on new bidirectional tasks, relying on shallow cues instead of coordinate-aware representations.
GeoWeaver performs token-adaptive geometric grounding on visual tokens from a multi-level bank prior to language modeling to support better spatio-temporal reasoning.
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.
SpatialForge synthesizes 10 million spatial QA pairs from in-the-wild 2D images to train VLMs for better depth ordering, layout, and viewpoint-dependent reasoning.
Meta-CoT uses two-level decomposition of editing operations into meta-tasks and a CoT consistency reward to improve granularity and generalization, reporting 15.8% gains across 21 tasks.
Visual replay module and adaptive depth scaling improve multimodal latent reasoning, reaching SOTA benchmarks with faster inference than explicit chain-of-thought methods.
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.
OmniDrive-R1 boosts VLM reasoning score from 51.77% to 80.35% and answer accuracy from 37.81% to 73.62% on DriveLMM-o1 via reinforcement-driven interleaved multi-modal chain-of-thought with annotation-free grounding.
citing papers explorer
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Optical Reasoning: Rethinking Images as an Expressive Reasoning Medium Beyond Text
Optical reasoning encodes rationales in images rather than text, matching or exceeding text-based performance on math, science, and multimodal benchmarks while cutting tokens by 28.57% on language tasks and 16% on multimodal 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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Reasoning Portability: Guiding Continual Learning for MLLMs in the RLVR Era
Formalizes Reasoning Portability (RP) and proposes RDB-CL to modulate per-sample KL regularization in RLVR for MLLM continual learning, achieving +12.0% Last accuracy over vanilla RLVR baseline by preserving reusable reasoning on high-RP samples.
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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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UniPath: Adaptive Coordination of Understanding and Generation for Unified Multimodal Reasoning
UniPath adaptively models coordination-path diversity in unified multimodal models by training a path-conditioned executor and using a lightweight planner for input-dependent selection, improving performance over fixed strategies.
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SketchVLM: Vision language models can annotate images to explain thoughts and guide users
SketchVLM lets VLMs generate non-destructive SVG annotations on input images to visually explain answers, raising visual reasoning accuracy by up to 28.5 points and annotation quality by 1.48x over baselines.
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Omni-R1: Towards the Unified Generative Paradigm for Multimodal Reasoning
Omni-R1 unifies multimodal reasoning by generating intermediate images during the process in a SFT-plus-RL framework, with an Omni-R1-Zero variant that matches or exceeds it using only text data.
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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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Latent Visual Reasoning
Latent Visual Reasoning enables autoregressive generation of latent visual states that reconstruct critical image tokens, yielding gains on perception-heavy VQA benchmarks such as 71.67% on MMVP.
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OpenCoF: Learning to Reason Through Video Generation
Fine-tuning a video generator on a new 17K reasoning-video dataset improves Chain-of-Frame reasoning, and adding learnable visual/textual reasoning tokens yields further gains on external 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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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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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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Dive into the Scene: Breaking the Perceptual Bottleneck in Vision-Language Decision Making via Focus Plan Generation
SceneDiver introduces a coarse-to-fine focus plan generation approach for VLMs that constructs holistic scene graphs then iteratively decomposes tasks, plus a distillation adapter for VLAs, to reduce visual hallucinations in embodied AI benchmarks.
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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
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SPACENUM: Revisiting Spatial Numerical Understanding in VLMs
VLMs fail to ground numerical values in spatial perception on new bidirectional tasks, relying on shallow cues instead of coordinate-aware representations.
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GeoWeaver: Grounding Visual Tokens with Geometric Evidence before Scene Reasoning
GeoWeaver performs token-adaptive geometric grounding on visual tokens from a multi-level bank prior to language modeling to support better spatio-temporal reasoning.
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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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SpatialForge: Bootstrapping 3D-Aware Spatial Reasoning from Open-World 2D Images
SpatialForge synthesizes 10 million spatial QA pairs from in-the-wild 2D images to train VLMs for better depth ordering, layout, and viewpoint-dependent reasoning.
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Meta-CoT: Enhancing Granularity and Generalization in Image Editing
Meta-CoT uses two-level decomposition of editing operations into meta-tasks and a CoT consistency reward to improve granularity and generalization, reporting 15.8% gains across 21 tasks.
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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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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.
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OmniDrive-R1: Reinforcement-driven Interleaved Multi-modal Chain-of-Thought for Trustworthy Vision-Language Autonomous Driving
OmniDrive-R1 boosts VLM reasoning score from 51.77% to 80.35% and answer accuracy from 37.81% to 73.62% on DriveLMM-o1 via reinforcement-driven interleaved multi-modal chain-of-thought with annotation-free grounding.
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Mull-Tokens: Modality-Agnostic Latent Thinking
Mull-Tokens are modality-agnostic latent tokens that enable free-form multimodal thinking and deliver up to 16% gains on spatial reasoning benchmarks.
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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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The Landscape of Agentic Reinforcement Learning for LLMs: A Survey
Survey that defines agentic RL for LLMs via POMDPs, introduces a taxonomy of planning/tool-use/memory/reasoning capabilities and domains, and compiles open environments from over 500 papers.
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GoViG: Goal-Conditioned Visual Navigation Instruction Generation via Multimodal Reasoning
GoViG decomposes goal-conditioned navigation instruction generation into visual state prediction and instruction synthesis using an autoregressive multimodal LLM with one-pass and interleaved reasoning, showing gains on a new R2R-Goal dataset.
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Reinforcing Spatial Reasoning in Vision-Language Models with Interwoven Thinking and Visual Drawing
VILASR integrates visual drawing operations with reasoning in LVLMs via cold-start synthetic training, reflective rejection sampling, and reinforcement learning, yielding an 18.4% average gain on spatial reasoning benchmarks.
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MathVis-Fine: Aligning Visual Supervision with Necessity via Progressive Dependency-Guided Training for Multimodal Mathematical Reasoning
MathVis-Fine proposes a dataset with fine-grained visual annotations and dependency ratings plus a progressive two-stage training paradigm to align visual supervision with sample-specific necessity in multimodal mathematical reasoning.
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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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IndusAgent: Reinforcing Open-Vocabulary Industrial Anomaly Detection with Agentic Tools
IndusAgent achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot performance on industrial anomaly benchmarks by using a custom Indus-CoT dataset, dynamic tool orchestration, and gated RL to optimize anomaly classification, localization, and reasoning.
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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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Steadily moving semi-infinite fracture in plane poroelasticity
XEmbodied achieves SOTA on 18 embodied VQA benchmarks by fusing 3D geometric tokens and distilled physical cues into a 30B VLM with progressive curriculum training.
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SpatialImaginer: Towards Adaptive Visual Imagination for Spatial Reasoning
SpatialImaginer integrates visual imagination with textual chain-of-thought to improve spatial reasoning robustness in multimodal large language models.
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MedLVR: Latent Visual Reasoning for Reliable Medical Visual Question Answering
Latent visual reasoning with ROI-supervised fine-tuning and latent-space policy optimization raises average medical VQA accuracy from 48.3% to 53.4% on five external benchmarks.
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Learning to Focus and Precise Cropping: A Reinforcement Learning Framework with Information Gaps and Grounding Loss for MLLMs
A two-stage RL method with information gaps and grounding loss trains MLLMs to focus on and precisely crop relevant image regions, yielding SOTA results on high-resolution VQA benchmarks.
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MASS: Motion-Aware Spatial-Temporal Grounding for Physics Reasoning and Comprehension in Vision-Language Models
MASS adds spatiotemporal motion signals and 3D grounding to VLMs and releases MASS-Bench, yielding physics-reasoning performance within 2% of Gemini-2.5-Flash after reinforcement fine-tuning.
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XEmbodied: A Foundation Model with Enhanced Geometric and Physical Cues for Large-Scale Embodied Environments
XEmbodied is a foundation model that integrates 3D geometric and physical signals into VLMs using a 3D Adapter and Efficient Image-Embodied Adapter, plus progressive curriculum and RL post-training, to improve spatial reasoning and embodied performance on 18 benchmarks.
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Multimodal Chain-of-Thought Reasoning: A Comprehensive Survey
The paper provides the first comprehensive survey of multimodal chain-of-thought reasoning, including foundational concepts, a taxonomy of methodologies, application analyses, challenges, and future directions.