Daily Papers

Recent advancements in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have achieved significant multimodal generation capabilities, akin to GPT-4. These models predominantly map visual information into language representation space, leveraging the vast knowledge and powerful text generation abilities of LLMs to produce multimodal instruction-following responses. We could term this method as LLMs for Vision because of its employing LLMs for visual-language understanding, yet observe that these MLLMs neglect the potential of harnessing visual knowledge to enhance overall capabilities of LLMs, which could be regraded as Vision Enhancing LLMs. In this paper, we propose an approach called MKS2, aimed at enhancing LLMs through empowering Multimodal Knowledge Storage and Sharing in LLMs. Specifically, we introduce the Modular Visual Memory, a component integrated into the internal blocks of LLMs, designed to store open-world visual information efficiently. Additionally, we present a soft Mixtures-of-Multimodal Experts architecture in LLMs to invoke multimodal knowledge collaboration during generation. Our comprehensive experiments demonstrate that MKS2 substantially augments the reasoning capabilities of LLMs in contexts necessitating physical or commonsense knowledge. It also delivers competitive results on multimodal benchmarks.

Existing multimodal retrieval systems excel at semantic matching but implicitly assume that query-image relevance can be measured in isolation. This paradigm overlooks the rich dependencies inherent in realistic visual streams, where information is distributed across temporal sequences rather than confined to single snapshots. To bridge this gap, we introduce DeepImageSearch, a novel agentic paradigm that reformulates image retrieval as an autonomous exploration task. Models must plan and perform multi-step reasoning over raw visual histories to locate targets based on implicit contextual cues. We construct DISBench, a challenging benchmark built on interconnected visual data. To address the scalability challenge of creating context-dependent queries, we propose a human-model collaborative pipeline that employs vision-language models to mine latent spatiotemporal associations, effectively offloading intensive context discovery before human verification. Furthermore, we build a robust baseline using a modular agent framework equipped with fine-grained tools and a dual-memory system for long-horizon navigation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DISBench poses significant challenges to state-of-the-art models, highlighting the necessity of incorporating agentic reasoning into next-generation retrieval systems.

Despite the remarkable success of Vision-Language Models (VLMs), their performance on a range of complex visual tasks is often hindered by a "visual processing bottleneck": a propensity to lose grounding in visual evidence and exhibit a deficit in contextualized visual experience during prolonged generation. Drawing inspiration from human cognitive memory theory, which distinguishes short-term visually-dominant memory and long-term semantically-dominant memory, we propose VisMem, a cognitively-aligned framework that equips VLMs with dynamic latent vision memories, a short-term module for fine-grained perceptual retention and a long-term module for abstract semantic consolidation. These memories are seamlessly invoked during inference, allowing VLMs to maintain both perceptual fidelity and semantic consistency across thinking and generation. Extensive experiments across diverse visual benchmarks for understanding, reasoning, and generation reveal that VisMem delivers a significant average performance boost of 11.8% relative to the vanilla model and outperforms all counterparts, establishing a new paradigm for latent-space memory enhancement. The code will be available: https://github.com/YU-deep/VisMem.git.

Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) in large-scale urban environments requires embodied agents to ground linguistic instructions in complex scenes and recall relevant experiences over extended time horizons. Prior modular pipelines offer interpretability but lack unified memory, while end-to-end (M)LLM agents excel at fusing vision and language yet remain constrained by fixed context windows and implicit spatial reasoning. We introduce Mem4Nav, a hierarchical spatial-cognition long-short memory system that can augment any VLN backbone. Mem4Nav fuses a sparse octree for fine-grained voxel indexing with a semantic topology graph for high-level landmark connectivity, storing both in trainable memory tokens embedded via a reversible Transformer. Long-term memory (LTM) compresses and retains historical observations at both octree and graph nodes, while short-term memory (STM) caches recent multimodal entries in relative coordinates for real-time obstacle avoidance and local planning. At each step, STM retrieval sharply prunes dynamic context, and, when deeper history is needed, LTM tokens are decoded losslessly to reconstruct past embeddings. Evaluated on Touchdown and Map2Seq across three backbones (modular, state-of-the-art VLN with prompt-based LLM, and state-of-the-art VLN with strided-attention MLLM), Mem4Nav yields 7-13 pp gains in Task Completion, sufficient SPD reduction, and >10 pp nDTW improvement. Ablations confirm the indispensability of both the hierarchical map and dual memory modules. Our codes are open-sourced via https://github.com/tsinghua-fib-lab/Mem4Nav.

Modular approaches, which use a different composition of modules for each problem and avoid forgetting by design, have been shown to be a promising direction in continual learning (CL). However, searching through the large, discrete space of possible module compositions is a challenge because evaluating a composition's performance requires a round of neural network training. To address this challenge, we develop a modular CL framework, called PICLE, that accelerates search by using a probabilistic model to cheaply compute the fitness of each composition. The model combines prior knowledge about good module compositions with dataset-specific information. Its use is complemented by splitting up the search space into subsets, such as perceptual and latent subsets. We show that PICLE is the first modular CL algorithm to achieve different types of transfer while scaling to large search spaces. We evaluate it on two benchmark suites designed to capture different desiderata of CL techniques. On these benchmarks, PICLE offers significantly better performance than state-of-the-art CL baselines.

MLLMs exhibit strong reasoning on isolated queries, yet they operate de novo -- solving each problem independently and often repeating the same mistakes. Existing memory-augmented agents mainly store past trajectories for reuse. However, trajectory-based memory suffers from brevity bias, gradually losing essential domain knowledge. More critically, even in truly multimodal problem-solving settings, it records only a single-modality trace of past behavior, failing to preserve how visual attention and logical reasoning jointly contributed to the solution. This is fundamentally misaligned with human cognition: semantic memory is both multimodal and integrated, preserving visual and abstract knowledge through coordinated but distinct representational streams. We thus introduce ViLoMem, a dual-stream memory framework that constructs compact, schema-based memory. It separately encodes visual distraction patterns and logical reasoning errors, enabling MLLMs to learn from their successful and failed experiences. Following a grow-and-refine principle, the system incrementally accumulates and updates multimodal semantic knowledge -- preserving stable, generalizable strategies while avoiding catastrophic forgetting. Across six multimodal benchmarks, ViLoMem consistently improves pass@1 accuracy and substantially reduces repeated visual and logical errors. Ablations confirm the necessity of dual-stream memory with explicit distraction--hallucination separation, demonstrating the value of error-aware multimodal memory for lifelong and cross-domain agentic learning. Our project page will be available at https://weihao-bo.github.io/ViLoMeo-page.

How humans and machines make sense of current inputs for relation reasoning and question-answering while putting the perceived information into context of our past memories, has been a challenging conundrum in cognitive science and artificial intelligence. Inspired by human brain's memory system and cognitive architectures, we propose a PMI framework that consists of perception, memory and inference components. Notably, the memory module comprises working and long-term memory, with the latter endowed with a higher-order structure to retain more accumulated knowledge and experiences. Through a differentiable competitive write access, current perceptions update working memory, which is later merged with long-term memory via outer product associations, averting memory overflow and minimizing information conflicts. In the inference module, relevant information is retrieved from two separate memory origins and associatively integrated to attain a more comprehensive and precise interpretation of current perceptions. We exploratively apply our PMI to improve prevailing Transformers and CNN models on question-answering tasks like bAbI-20k and Sort-of-CLEVR datasets, as well as relation calculation and image classification tasks, and in each case, our PMI enhancements consistently outshine their original counterparts significantly. Visualization analyses reveal that memory consolidation, along with the interaction and integration of information from diverse memory sources, substantially contributes to the model effectiveness on inference tasks.

Visual content memorability has intrigued the scientific community for decades, with applications ranging widely, from understanding nuanced aspects of human memory to enhancing content design. A significant challenge in progressing the field lies in the expensive process of collecting memorability annotations from humans. This limits the diversity and scalability of datasets for modeling visual content memorability. Most existing datasets are limited to collecting aggregate memorability scores for visual content, not capturing the nuanced memorability signals present in natural, open-ended recall descriptions. In this work, we introduce the first large-scale unsupervised dataset designed explicitly for modeling visual memorability signals, containing over 82,000 videos, accompanied by descriptive recall data. We leverage tip-of-the-tongue (ToT) retrieval queries from online platforms such as Reddit. We demonstrate that our unsupervised dataset provides rich signals for two memorability-related tasks: recall generation and ToT retrieval. Large vision-language models fine-tuned on our dataset outperform state-of-the-art models such as GPT-4o in generating open-ended memorability descriptions for visual content. We also employ a contrastive training strategy to create the first model capable of performing multimodal ToT retrieval. Our dataset and models present a novel direction, facilitating progress in visual content memorability research.

We present 3D Spatial MultiModal Memory (M3), a multimodal memory system designed to retain information about medium-sized static scenes through video sources for visual perception. By integrating 3D Gaussian Splatting techniques with foundation models, M3 builds a multimodal memory capable of rendering feature representations across granularities, encompassing a wide range of knowledge. In our exploration, we identify two key challenges in previous works on feature splatting: (1) computational constraints in storing high-dimensional features for each Gaussian primitive, and (2) misalignment or information loss between distilled features and foundation model features. To address these challenges, we propose M3 with key components of principal scene components and Gaussian memory attention, enabling efficient training and inference. To validate M3, we conduct comprehensive quantitative evaluations of feature similarity and downstream tasks, as well as qualitative visualizations to highlight the pixel trace of Gaussian memory attention. Our approach encompasses a diverse range of foundation models, including vision-language models (VLMs), perception models, and large multimodal and language models (LMMs/LLMs). Furthermore, to demonstrate real-world applicability, we deploy M3's feature field in indoor scenes on a quadruped robot. Notably, we claim that M3 is the first work to address the core compression challenges in 3D feature distillation.

Despite their impressive capabilities, multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are prone to hallucinations, i.e., the generated content that is nonsensical or unfaithful to input sources. Unlike in LLMs, hallucinations in MLLMs often stem from the sensitivity of text decoder to visual tokens, leading to a phenomenon akin to "amnesia" about visual information. To address this issue, we propose MemVR, a novel decoding paradigm inspired by common cognition: when the memory of an image seen the moment before is forgotten, people will look at it again for factual answers. Following this principle, we treat visual tokens as supplementary evidence, re-injecting them into the MLLM through Feed Forward Network (FFN) as "key-value memory" at the middle trigger layer. This "look-twice" mechanism occurs when the model exhibits high uncertainty during inference, effectively enhancing factual alignment. Comprehensive experimental evaluations demonstrate that MemVR significantly mitigates hallucination across various MLLMs and excels in general benchmarks without incurring additional time overhead. The implementation is available from https://github.com/1zhou-Wang/MemVR

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have recently demonstrated remarkable capabilities in comprehending complex visual content. However, the mechanisms underlying how VLMs process visual information remain largely unexplored. In this paper, we conduct a thorough empirical analysis, focusing on attention modules across layers. We reveal several key insights about how these models process visual data: (i) the internal representation of the query tokens (e.g., representations of "describe the image"), is utilized by VLMs to store global image information; we demonstrate that these models generate surprisingly descriptive responses solely from these tokens, without direct access to image tokens. (ii) Cross-modal information flow is predominantly influenced by the middle layers (approximately 25% of all layers), while early and late layers contribute only marginally.(iii) Fine-grained visual attributes and object details are directly extracted from image tokens in a spatially localized manner, i.e., the generated tokens associated with a specific object or attribute attend strongly to their corresponding regions in the image. We propose novel quantitative evaluation to validate our observations, leveraging real-world complex visual scenes. Finally, we demonstrate the potential of our findings in facilitating efficient visual processing in state-of-the-art VLMs.

Transfer learning has recently become the dominant paradigm of machine learning. Pre-trained models fine-tuned for downstream tasks achieve better performance with fewer labelled examples. Nonetheless, it remains unclear how to develop models that specialise towards multiple tasks without incurring negative interference and that generalise systematically to non-identically distributed tasks. Modular deep learning has emerged as a promising solution to these challenges. In this framework, units of computation are often implemented as autonomous parameter-efficient modules. Information is conditionally routed to a subset of modules and subsequently aggregated. These properties enable positive transfer and systematic generalisation by separating computation from routing and updating modules locally. We offer a survey of modular architectures, providing a unified view over several threads of research that evolved independently in the scientific literature. Moreover, we explore various additional purposes of modularity, including scaling language models, causal inference, programme induction, and planning in reinforcement learning. Finally, we report various concrete applications where modularity has been successfully deployed such as cross-lingual and cross-modal knowledge transfer. Related talks and projects to this survey, are available at https://www.modulardeeplearning.com/.

We propose a novel memory mechanism to build video generators that can explore environments interactively. Similar results have previously been achieved by out-painting 2D views of the scene while incrementally reconstructing its 3D geometry, which quickly accumulates errors, or by video generators with a short context window, which struggle to maintain scene coherence over the long term. To address these limitations, we introduce Surfel-Indexed View Memory (VMem), a mechanism that remembers past views by indexing them geometrically based on the 3D surface elements (surfels) they have observed. VMem enables the efficient retrieval of the most relevant past views when generating new ones. By focusing only on these relevant views, our method produces consistent explorations of imagined environments at a fraction of the computational cost of using all past views as context. We evaluate our approach on challenging long-term scene synthesis benchmarks and demonstrate superior performance compared to existing methods in maintaining scene coherence and camera control.

While Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning significantly enhances the performance of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), its autoregressive nature incurs prohibitive latency constraints. Current efforts to mitigate this via token compression often fail by blindly applying text-centric metrics to multimodal contexts. We identify a critical failure mode termed Visual Amnesia, where linguistically redundant tokens are erroneously pruned, leading to hallucinations. To address this, we introduce V-Skip that reformulates token pruning as a Visual-Anchored Information Bottleneck (VA-IB) optimization problem. V-Skip employs a dual-path gating mechanism that weighs token importance through both linguistic surprisal and cross-modal attention flow, effectively rescuing visually salient anchors. Extensive experiments on Qwen2-VL and Llama-3.2 families demonstrate that V-Skip achieves a 2.9times speedup with negligible accuracy loss. Specifically, it preserves fine-grained visual details, outperforming other baselines over 30\% on the DocVQA.

Comprehending extended audiovisual experiences remains a fundamental challenge for computational systems. Current approaches struggle with temporal integration and cross-modal associations that humans accomplish effortlessly through hippocampal-cortical networks. We introduce HippoMM, a biologically-inspired architecture that transforms hippocampal mechanisms into computational advantages for multimodal understanding. HippoMM implements three key innovations: (i) hippocampus-inspired pattern separation and completion specifically designed for continuous audiovisual streams, (ii) short-to-long term memory consolidation that transforms perceptual details into semantic abstractions, and (iii) cross-modal associative retrieval pathways enabling modality-crossing queries. Unlike existing retrieval systems with static indexing schemes, HippoMM dynamically forms integrated episodic representations through adaptive temporal segmentation and dual-process memory encoding. Evaluations on our challenging HippoVlog benchmark demonstrate that HippoMM significantly outperforms state-of-the-art approaches (78.2% vs. 64.2% accuracy) while providing substantially faster response times (20.4s vs. 112.5s). Our results demonstrate that translating neuroscientific memory principles into computational architectures provides a promising foundation for next-generation multimodal understanding systems. The code and benchmark dataset are publicly available at https://github.com/linyueqian/HippoMM.

Vision-language models (VLMs) are powerful but remain opaque black boxes. We introduce the first framework for transparent circuit tracing in VLMs to systematically analyze multimodal reasoning. By utilizing transcoders, attribution graphs, and attention-based methods, we uncover how VLMs hierarchically integrate visual and semantic concepts. We reveal that distinct visual feature circuits can handle mathematical reasoning and support cross-modal associations. Validated through feature steering and circuit patching, our framework proves these circuits are causal and controllable, laying the groundwork for more explainable and reliable VLMs.

Recent advances in video large language models have demonstrated strong capabilities in understanding short clips. However, scaling them to hours- or days-long videos remains highly challenging due to limited context capacity and the loss of critical visual details during abstraction. Existing memory-augmented methods mitigate this by leveraging textual summaries of video segments, yet they heavily rely on text and fail to utilize visual evidence when reasoning over complex scenes. Moreover, retrieving from fixed temporal scales further limits their flexibility in capturing events that span variable durations. To address this, we introduce WorldMM, a novel multimodal memory agent that constructs and retrieves from multiple complementary memories, encompassing both textual and visual representations. WorldMM comprises three types of memory: episodic memory indexes factual events across multiple temporal scales, semantic memory continuously updates high-level conceptual knowledge, and visual memory preserves detailed information about scenes. During inference, an adaptive retrieval agent iteratively selects the most relevant memory source and leverages multiple temporal granularities based on the query, continuing until it determines that sufficient information has been gathered. WorldMM significantly outperforms existing baselines across five long video question-answering benchmarks, achieving an average 8.4% performance gain over previous state-of-the-art methods, showing its effectiveness on long video reasoning.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable success in open-vocabulary perceptual tasks, yet their ability to solve complex cognitive problems remains limited, especially when visual details are abstract and require visual memory. Current approaches primarily scale Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning in the text space, even when language alone is insufficient for clear and structured reasoning, and largely neglect visual reasoning mechanisms analogous to the human visuospatial sketchpad and visual imagery. To mitigate this deficiency, we introduce Cognitive Supersensing, a novel training paradigm that endows MLLMs with human-like visual imagery capabilities by integrating a Latent Visual Imagery Prediction (LVIP) head that jointly learns sequences of visual cognitive latent embeddings and aligns them with the answer, thereby forming vision-based internal reasoning chains. We further introduce a reinforcement learning stage that optimizes text reasoning paths based on this grounded visual latent. To evaluate the cognitive capabilities of MLLMs, we present CogSense-Bench, a comprehensive visual question answering (VQA) benchmark assessing five cognitive dimensions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MLLMs trained with Cognitive Supersensing significantly outperform state-of-the-art baselines on CogSense-Bench and exhibit superior generalization on out-of-domain mathematics and science VQA benchmarks, suggesting that internal visual imagery is potentially key to bridging the gap between perceptual recognition and cognitive understanding. We will open-source the CogSense-Bench and our model weights.

Long-horizon multimodal agents depend on external memory; however, similarity-based retrieval often surfaces stale, low-credibility, or conflicting items, which can trigger overconfident errors. We propose Multimodal Memory Agent (MMA), which assigns each retrieved memory item a dynamic reliability score by combining source credibility, temporal decay, and conflict-aware network consensus, and uses this signal to reweight evidence and abstain when support is insufficient. We also introduce MMA-Bench, a programmatically generated benchmark for belief dynamics with controlled speaker reliability and structured text-vision contradictions. Using this framework, we uncover the "Visual Placebo Effect", revealing how RAG-based agents inherit latent visual biases from foundation models. On FEVER, MMA matches baseline accuracy while reducing variance by 35.2% and improving selective utility; on LoCoMo, a safety-oriented configuration improves actionable accuracy and reduces wrong answers; on MMA-Bench, MMA reaches 41.18% Type-B accuracy in Vision mode, while the baseline collapses to 0.0% under the same protocol. Code: https://github.com/AIGeeksGroup/MMA.

We present XMem, a video object segmentation architecture for long videos with unified feature memory stores inspired by the Atkinson-Shiffrin memory model. Prior work on video object segmentation typically only uses one type of feature memory. For videos longer than a minute, a single feature memory model tightly links memory consumption and accuracy. In contrast, following the Atkinson-Shiffrin model, we develop an architecture that incorporates multiple independent yet deeply-connected feature memory stores: a rapidly updated sensory memory, a high-resolution working memory, and a compact thus sustained long-term memory. Crucially, we develop a memory potentiation algorithm that routinely consolidates actively used working memory elements into the long-term memory, which avoids memory explosion and minimizes performance decay for long-term prediction. Combined with a new memory reading mechanism, XMem greatly exceeds state-of-the-art performance on long-video datasets while being on par with state-of-the-art methods (that do not work on long videos) on short-video datasets. Code is available at https://hkchengrex.github.io/XMem

Unified Multimodal Generative Models (UMGMs) unify visual understanding and image generation within a single autoregressive framework. However, their ability to continually learn new tasks is severely hindered by catastrophic forgetting, both within a modality (intra-modal) and across modalities (inter-modal). While intra-modal forgetting has been studied in prior continual learning (CL) work, inter-modal forgetting remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we identify and empirically validate this phenomenon in UMGMs and provide a theoretical explanation rooted in gradient conflict between modalities. To address both intra- and inter-modal forgetting, we propose Modality-Decoupled Experts (MoDE), a lightweight and scalable architecture that isolates modality-specific updates to mitigate the gradient conflict and leverages knowledge distillation to prevent catastrophic forgetting and preserve pre-trained capabilities. Unlike previous CL methods that remain modality-coupled and suffer from modality gradient conflict, MoDE explicitly decouples modalities to prevent interference. Experiments across diverse benchmarks demonstrate that MoDE significantly mitigates both inter- and intra-modal forgetting, outperforming prior CL baselines in unified multimodal generation settings. Codes will be publicly available: https://github.com/Christina200/MoDE-official.git

Despite rapid progress in large-scale language and vision models, AI agents still suffer from a fundamental limitation: they cannot remember. Without reliable memory, agents catastrophically forget past experiences, struggle with long-horizon reasoning, and fail to operate coherently in multimodal or interactive environments. We introduce MemVerse, a model-agnostic, plug-and-play memory framework that bridges fast parametric recall with hierarchical retrieval-based memory, enabling scalable and adaptive multimodal intelligence. MemVerse maintains short-term memory for recent context while transforming raw multimodal experiences into structured long-term memories organized as hierarchical knowledge graphs. This design supports continual consolidation, adaptive forgetting, and bounded memory growth. To handle real-time demands, MemVerse introduces a periodic distillation mechanism that compresses essential knowledge from long-term memory into the parametric model, allowing fast, differentiable recall while preserving interpretability. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MemVerse significantly improves multimodal reasoning and continual learning efficiency, empowering agents to remember, adapt, and reason coherently across extended interactions.

Over more than a decade there has been an extensive research effort on how to effectively utilize recurrent models and attention. While recurrent models aim to compress the data into a fixed-size memory (called hidden state), attention allows attending to the entire context window, capturing the direct dependencies of all tokens. This more accurate modeling of dependencies, however, comes with a quadratic cost, limiting the model to a fixed-length context. We present a new neural long-term memory module that learns to memorize historical context and helps attention to attend to the current context while utilizing long past information. We show that this neural memory has the advantage of fast parallelizable training while maintaining a fast inference. From a memory perspective, we argue that attention due to its limited context but accurate dependency modeling performs as a short-term memory, while neural memory due to its ability to memorize the data, acts as a long-term, more persistent, memory. Based on these two modules, we introduce a new family of architectures, called Titans, and present three variants to address how one can effectively incorporate memory into this architecture. Our experimental results on language modeling, common-sense reasoning, genomics, and time series tasks show that Titans are more effective than Transformers and recent modern linear recurrent models. They further can effectively scale to larger than 2M context window size with higher accuracy in needle-in-haystack tasks compared to baselines.

Recent large vision-language models (LVLMs) can generate vision-text multimodal chain-of-thought (MCoT) traces after reinforcement fine-tuning (RFT). However, we observe that the visual information incorporated in MCoT is often inaccurate, though still yield correct answers, indicating a lack of faithfulness in the MCoT reasoning process. We attribute this unfaithfulness to the RL reward in RFT, which solely incentivizes the format of interleaved vision-text cues, ie, it encourages the model to incorporate visual information into its text reasoning steps without considering the correctness of the visual information. In this paper, we first probe the faithfulness of MCoT by measuring how much the prediction changes when its visual and textual thoughts are intervened. Surprisingly, the model's predictions remain nearly unchanged under visual intervention but change significantly under textual intervention, indicating that the visual evidence is largely ignored. To further analyze visual information, we introduce an automated LVLM-based evaluation metric that quantifies the faithfulness of visual cues from two perspectives: reliability and sufficiency. Our evaluation reveals that the visual information in current MCoT traces is simultaneously unreliable and insufficient. To address this issue, we propose a novel MCoT learning strategy termed Sufficient-Component Cause Model (SCCM) learning. This approach encourages the MCoT to generate sufficient yet minimal visual components that are independently capable of leading to correct answers. We note that the proposed SCCM is annotation-free and compatible with various RFT for MCoT in a plug-and-play manner. Empirical results demonstrate that SCCM consistently improves the visual faithfulness across a suite of fine-grained perception and reasoning benchmarks. Code is available at https://github.com/EugeneLiu01/Faithful_Thinking_with_Image.

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have achieved significant success in multimodal tasks, with multimodal chain-of-thought (MCoT) further enhancing performance and interpretability. Recent MCoT methods fall into two categories: (i) Textual-MCoT (T-MCoT), which takes multimodal input and produces textual output; and (ii) Interleaved-MCoT (I-MCoT), which generates interleaved image-text outputs. Despite advances in both approaches, the mechanisms driving these improvements are not fully understood. To fill this gap, we first reveal that MCoT boosts LVLMs by incorporating visual thoughts, which convey image information to the reasoning process regardless of the MCoT format, depending only on clarity and conciseness of expression. Furthermore, to explore visual thoughts systematically, we define four distinct forms of visual thought expressions and analyze them comprehensively. Our findings demonstrate that these forms differ in clarity and conciseness, yielding varying levels of MCoT improvement. Additionally, we explore the internal nature of visual thoughts, finding that visual thoughts serve as intermediaries between the input image and reasoning to deeper transformer layers, enabling more advanced visual information transmission. We hope that the visual thoughts can inspire further breakthroughs for future MCoT research.

Memory plays a foundational role in augmenting the reasoning, adaptability, and contextual fidelity of modern Large Language Models and Multi-Modal LLMs. As these models transition from static predictors to interactive systems capable of continual learning and personalized inference, the incorporation of memory mechanisms has emerged as a central theme in their architectural and functional evolution. This survey presents a comprehensive and structured synthesis of memory in LLMs and MLLMs, organizing the literature into a cohesive taxonomy comprising implicit, explicit, and agentic memory paradigms. Specifically, the survey delineates three primary memory frameworks. Implicit memory refers to the knowledge embedded within the internal parameters of pre-trained transformers, encompassing their capacity for memorization, associative retrieval, and contextual reasoning. Recent work has explored methods to interpret, manipulate, and reconfigure this latent memory. Explicit memory involves external storage and retrieval components designed to augment model outputs with dynamic, queryable knowledge representations, such as textual corpora, dense vectors, and graph-based structures, thereby enabling scalable and updatable interaction with information sources. Agentic memory introduces persistent, temporally extended memory structures within autonomous agents, facilitating long-term planning, self-consistency, and collaborative behavior in multi-agent systems, with relevance to embodied and interactive AI. Extending beyond text, the survey examines the integration of memory within multi-modal settings, where coherence across vision, language, audio, and action modalities is essential. Key architectural advances, benchmark tasks, and open challenges are discussed, including issues related to memory capacity, alignment, factual consistency, and cross-system interoperability.

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) typically learn visual capacity through visual instruction tuning, involving updates to both a projector and their LLM backbones. Drawing inspiration from the concept of visual region in the human brain, we investigate the existence of an analogous visual region within LLMs that functions as a cognitive core, and explore the possibility of efficient training of LVLMs via selective layers tuning. We use Bunny-Llama-3-8B-V for detailed experiments and LLaVA-1.5-7B and LLaVA-1.5-13B for validation across a range of visual and textual tasks. Our findings reveal that selectively updating 25\% of LLMs layers, when sparsely and uniformly distributed, can preserve nearly 99\% of visual performance while maintaining or enhancing textual task results, and also effectively reducing training time. Based on this targeted training approach, we further propose a novel visual region-based pruning paradigm, removing non-critical layers outside the visual region, which can achieve minimal performance loss. This study offers an effective and efficient strategy for LVLM training and inference by activating a layer-wise visual region within LLMs, which is consistently effective across different models and parameter scales.

Neural Module Networks, originally proposed for the task of visual question answering, are a class of neural network architectures that involve human-specified neural modules, each designed for a specific form of reasoning. In current formulations of such networks only the parameters of the neural modules and/or the order of their execution is learned. In this work, we further expand this approach and also learn the underlying internal structure of modules in terms of the ordering and combination of simple and elementary arithmetic operators. Our results show that one is indeed able to simultaneously learn both internal module structure and module sequencing without extra supervisory signals for module execution sequencing. With this approach, we report performance comparable to models using hand-designed modules.

Incorporating modular designs into neural networks demonstrates superior out-of-generalization, learning efficiency, etc. Existing modular neural networks are generally explicit because their modular architectures are pre-defined, and individual modules are expected to implement distinct functions. Conversely, recent works reveal that there exist implicit modular structures in standard pre-trained transformers, namely Emergent Modularity. They indicate that such modular structures exhibit during the early pre-training phase and are totally spontaneous. However, most transformers are still treated as monolithic models with their modular natures underutilized. Therefore, given the excellent properties of explicit modular architecture, we explore whether and how dense pre-trained transformers can benefit from emergent modular structures. To study this question, we construct Emergent Mixture-of-Experts (EMoE). Without introducing additional parameters, EMoE can be seen as the modular counterpart of the original model and can be effortlessly incorporated into downstream tuning. Extensive experiments (we tune 1785 models) on various downstream tasks (vision and language) and models (22M to1.5B) demonstrate that EMoE effectively boosts in-domain and out-of-domain generalization abilities. Further analysis and ablation study suggest that EMoE mitigates negative knowledge transfer and is robust to various configurations. Code is available at https://github.com/qiuzh20/EMoE

Modular neural architectures are gaining increasing attention due to their powerful capability for generalization and sample-efficient adaptation to new domains. However, training modular models, particularly in the early stages, poses challenges due to the optimization difficulties arising from their intrinsic sparse connectivity. Leveraging the knowledge from monolithic models, using techniques such as knowledge distillation, is likely to facilitate the training of modular models and enable them to integrate knowledge from multiple models pretrained on diverse sources. Nevertheless, conventional knowledge distillation approaches are not tailored to modular models and can fail when directly applied due to the unique architectures and the enormous number of parameters involved. Motivated by these challenges, we propose a general module-to-module knowledge distillation (m2mKD) method for transferring knowledge between modules. Our approach involves teacher modules split from a pretrained monolithic model, and student modules of a modular model. m2mKD separately combines these modules with a shared meta model and encourages the student module to mimic the behaviour of the teacher module. We evaluate the effectiveness of m2mKD on two distinct modular neural architectures: Neural Attentive Circuits (NACs) and Vision Mixture-of-Experts (V-MoE). By applying m2mKD to NACs, we achieve significant improvements in IID accuracy on Tiny-ImageNet (up to 5.6%) and OOD robustness on Tiny-ImageNet-R (up to 4.2%). On average, we observe a 1% gain in both ImageNet and ImageNet-R. The V-MoE-Base model trained using m2mKD also achieves 3.5% higher accuracy than end-to-end training on ImageNet. The experimental results demonstrate that our method offers a promising solution for connecting modular networks with pretrained monolithic models. Code is available at https://github.com/kamanphoebe/m2mKD.

We present a model inspired by the Global Workspace Theory that integrates specialized modules to perform a sequential reasoning task. A controller selectively routes information between modules through the workspace using a gating mechanism. This approach allows the model to chain operations by iteratively broadcasting information between specialized domains, mimicking System-2 reasoning. We evaluate the model's performance on a simple addition task, where two addends must be summed. The task can be solved by routing information sequentially through an Input module, an Increment module (multiple times), and finally an Output module. We consider two implementations of this system with increasing complexity. First, using hand-designed modules operating on one-hot digit representations, the controller (a LSTM recurrent network) learns to select the appropriate modules (input, increment, output) in the appropriate sequence. Second, we replace the hand-designed modules with learned representation modules for MNIST images and an increment module trained on the task objectives; here again, the controller learns the appropriate sequential module selection to solve the task. Finally, we show that the Global Workspace model, while having fewer parameters, outperforms LSTMs and Transformers when tested on unseen addition operations (both interpolations and extrapolations of addition operations seen during training). Our results highlight the potential of architectures inspired by the Global Workspace Theory to enhance deep learning's reasoning capabilities.

Long-term memory is a critical capability for multimodal large language model (MLLM) agents, particularly in conversational settings where information accumulates and evolves over time. However, existing benchmarks either evaluate multi-session memory in text-only conversations or assess multimodal understanding within localized contexts, failing to evaluate how multimodal memory is preserved, organized, and evolved across long-term conversational trajectories. Thus, we introduce Mem-Gallery, a new benchmark for evaluating multimodal long-term conversational memory in MLLM agents. Mem-Gallery features high-quality multi-session conversations grounded in both visual and textual information, with long interaction horizons and rich multimodal dependencies. Building on this dataset, we propose a systematic evaluation framework that assesses key memory capabilities along three functional dimensions: memory extraction and test-time adaptation, memory reasoning, and memory knowledge management. Extensive benchmarking across thirteen memory systems reveals several key findings, highlighting the necessity of explicit multimodal information retention and memory organization, the persistent limitations in memory reasoning and knowledge management, as well as the efficiency bottleneck of current models.

Effectively retrieving, reasoning, and understanding multimodal information remains a critical challenge for agentic systems. Traditional Retrieval-augmented Generation (RAG) methods rely on linear interaction histories, which struggle to handle long-context tasks, especially those involving information-sparse yet token-heavy visual data in iterative reasoning scenarios. To bridge this gap, we introduce VimRAG, a framework tailored for multimodal Retrieval-augmented Reasoning across text, images, and videos. Inspired by our systematic study, we model the reasoning process as a dynamic directed acyclic graph that structures the agent states and retrieved multimodal evidence. Building upon this structured memory, we introduce a Graph-Modulated Visual Memory Encoding mechanism, with which the significance of memory nodes is evaluated via their topological position, allowing the model to dynamically allocate high-resolution tokens to pivotal evidence while compressing or discarding trivial clues. To implement this paradigm, we propose a Graph-Guided Policy Optimization strategy. This strategy disentangles step-wise validity from trajectory-level rewards by pruning memory nodes associated with redundant actions, thereby facilitating fine-grained credit assignment. Extensive experiments demonstrate that VimRAG consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance on diverse multimodal RAG benchmarks. The code is available at https://github.com/Alibaba-NLP/VRAG.

Creating AI systems that can interact with environments over long periods, similar to human cognition, has been a longstanding research goal. Recent advancements in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have made significant strides in open-world understanding. However, the challenge of continuous and simultaneous streaming perception, memory, and reasoning remains largely unexplored. Current MLLMs are constrained by their sequence-to-sequence architecture, which limits their ability to process inputs and generate responses simultaneously, akin to being unable to think while perceiving. Furthermore, relying on long contexts to store historical data is impractical for long-term interactions, as retaining all information becomes costly and inefficient. Therefore, rather than relying on a single foundation model to perform all functions, this project draws inspiration from the concept of the Specialized Generalist AI and introduces disentangled streaming perception, reasoning, and memory mechanisms, enabling real-time interaction with streaming video and audio input. The proposed framework InternLM-XComposer2.5-OmniLive (IXC2.5-OL) consists of three key modules: (1) Streaming Perception Module: Processes multimodal information in real-time, storing key details in memory and triggering reasoning in response to user queries. (2) Multi-modal Long Memory Module: Integrates short-term and long-term memory, compressing short-term memories into long-term ones for efficient retrieval and improved accuracy. (3) Reasoning Module: Responds to queries and executes reasoning tasks, coordinating with the perception and memory modules. This project simulates human-like cognition, enabling multimodal large language models to provide continuous and adaptive service over time.

In this work, we propose an architecture of LLM Modules that enables the transfer of knowledge from a large pre-trained model to a smaller model using an Enhanced Cross-Attention mechanism. In the proposed scheme, the Qwen2-1.5B model is frozen and its representations are passed through specially designed attention layers to the GPT-Neo-125M model, which is trained on limited computational resources. Experimental results on the Bespoke-Stratos-17k dataset demonstrate that after 15 epochs of training, the combined model generates responses comparable in quality to those obtained by distillation. We discuss the advantages of the modular approach, provide examples of input queries and comparative analysis, and outline prospects for further extension of the method.

Large language model (LLM)-based decision-making agents have shown the ability to generalize across multiple tasks. However, their performance relies on massive data and compute. We argue that this inefficiency stems from the forgetting phenomenon, in which a model memorizes its behaviors in parameters throughout training. As a result, training on a new task may deteriorate the model's performance on previous tasks. In contrast to LLMs' implicit memory mechanism, the human brain utilizes distributed memory storage, which helps manage and organize multiple skills efficiently, mitigating the forgetting phenomenon. Thus inspired, we propose an internal working memory module to store, blend, and retrieve information for different downstream tasks. Evaluation results show that the proposed method improves training efficiency and generalization in both Atari games and meta-world object manipulation tasks. Moreover, we demonstrate that memory fine-tuning further enhances the adaptability of the proposed architecture.

Episodic memory -- the ability to recall specific events grounded in time and space -- is a cornerstone of human cognition, enabling not only coherent storytelling, but also planning and decision-making. Despite their remarkable capabilities, Large Language Models (LLMs) lack a robust mechanism for episodic memory: we argue that integrating episodic memory capabilities into LLM is essential for advancing AI towards human-like cognition, increasing their potential to reason consistently and ground their output in real-world episodic events, hence avoiding confabulations. To address this challenge, we introduce a comprehensive framework to model and evaluate LLM episodic memory capabilities. Drawing inspiration from cognitive science, we develop a structured approach to represent episodic events, encapsulating temporal and spatial contexts, involved entities, and detailed descriptions. We synthesize a unique episodic memory benchmark, free from contamination, and release open source code and datasets to assess LLM performance across various recall and episodic reasoning tasks. Our evaluation of state-of-the-art models, including GPT-4 and Claude variants, Llama 3.1, and o1-mini, reveals that even the most advanced LLMs struggle with episodic memory tasks, particularly when dealing with multiple related events or complex spatio-temporal relationships -- even in contexts as short as 10k-100k tokens.

In this work, we study the Efficient Multimodal Large Language Model. Redundant vision tokens consume a significant amount of computational memory and resources. Therefore, many previous works compress them in the Vision Projector to reduce the number of vision tokens. However, simply compressing in the Vision Projector can lead to the loss of visual information, especially for tasks that rely on fine-grained spatial relationships, such as OCR and Chart \& Table Understanding. To address this problem, we propose Vision Remember, which is inserted between the LLM decoder layers to allow vision tokens to re-memorize vision features. Specifically, we retain multi-level vision features and resample them with the vision tokens that have interacted with the text token. During the resampling process, each vision token only attends to a local region in vision features, which is referred to as saliency-enhancing local attention. Saliency-enhancing local attention not only improves computational efficiency but also captures more fine-grained contextual information and spatial relationships within the region. Comprehensive experiments on multiple visual understanding benchmarks validate the effectiveness of our method when combined with various Efficient Vision Projectors, showing performance gains without sacrificing efficiency. Based on Vision Remember, LLaVA-VR with only 2B parameters is also superior to previous representative MLLMs such as Tokenpacker-HD-7B and DeepSeek-VL-7B.

Visual question answering is fundamentally compositional in nature---a question like "where is the dog?" shares substructure with questions like "what color is the dog?" and "where is the cat?" This paper seeks to simultaneously exploit the representational capacity of deep networks and the compositional linguistic structure of questions. We describe a procedure for constructing and learning *neural module networks*, which compose collections of jointly-trained neural "modules" into deep networks for question answering. Our approach decomposes questions into their linguistic substructures, and uses these structures to dynamically instantiate modular networks (with reusable components for recognizing dogs, classifying colors, etc.). The resulting compound networks are jointly trained. We evaluate our approach on two challenging datasets for visual question answering, achieving state-of-the-art results on both the VQA natural image dataset and a new dataset of complex questions about abstract shapes.

Spatial reasoning is a critical capability for intelligent robots, yet current vision-language models (VLMs) still fall short of human-level performance in video-based spatial reasoning. This gap mainly stems from two challenges: a semantic-geometric misalignment that prevents consistent 3D understanding, and the absence of persistent memory to retain 3D representation and understanding over time. To address these limitations, we present VLM^2, a Vision-Language Model with persistent Memory for spatial reasoning with a view-consistent, 3D-aware representation purely from 2D video. Specifically, to enhance long-horizon reasoning, we incorporate a dual-memory module, consisting of a working memory that operates as a sliding window to focus on immediate context, and an episodic memory that consolidates and stores critical long-term information. This design enables efficient and long-horizon spatial reasoning with a fixed computational cost. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks show that VLM^2 achieves state-of-the-art performance among video-only models, significantly advancing the frontier of visual-spatial intelligence.

We present Thinking with Generated Images, a novel paradigm that fundamentally transforms how large multimodal models (LMMs) engage with visual reasoning by enabling them to natively think across text and vision modalities through spontaneous generation of intermediate visual thinking steps. Current visual reasoning with LMMs is constrained to either processing fixed user-provided images or reasoning solely through text-based chain-of-thought (CoT). Thinking with Generated Images unlocks a new dimension of cognitive capability where models can actively construct intermediate visual thoughts, critique their own visual hypotheses, and refine them as integral components of their reasoning process. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach through two complementary mechanisms: (1) vision generation with intermediate visual subgoals, where models decompose complex visual tasks into manageable components that are generated and integrated progressively, and (2) vision generation with self-critique, where models generate an initial visual hypothesis, analyze its shortcomings through textual reasoning, and produce refined outputs based on their own critiques. Our experiments on vision generation benchmarks show substantial improvements over baseline approaches, with our models achieving up to 50% (from 38% to 57%) relative improvement in handling complex multi-object scenarios. From biochemists exploring novel protein structures, and architects iterating on spatial designs, to forensic analysts reconstructing crime scenes, and basketball players envisioning strategic plays, our approach enables AI models to engage in the kind of visual imagination and iterative refinement that characterizes human creative, analytical, and strategic thinking. We release our open-source suite at https://github.com/GAIR-NLP/thinking-with-generated-images.

Set-of-Mark (SoM) Prompting unleashes the visual grounding capability of GPT-4V, by enabling the model to associate visual objects with tags inserted on the image. These tags, marked with alphanumerics, can be indexed via text tokens for easy reference. Despite the extraordinary performance from GPT-4V, we observe that other Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) struggle to understand these visual tags. To promote the learning of SoM prompting for open-source models, we propose a new learning paradigm: "list items one by one," which asks the model to enumerate and describe all visual tags placed on the image following the alphanumeric orders of tags. By integrating our curated dataset with other visual instruction tuning datasets, we are able to equip existing MLLMs with the SoM prompting ability. Furthermore, we evaluate our finetuned SoM models on five MLLM benchmarks. We find that this new dataset, even in a relatively small size (10k-30k images with tags), significantly enhances visual reasoning capabilities and reduces hallucinations for MLLMs. Perhaps surprisingly, these improvements persist even when the visual tags are omitted from input images during inference. This suggests the potential of "list items one by one" as a new paradigm for training MLLMs, which strengthens the object-text alignment through the use of visual tags in the training stage. Finally, we conduct analyses by probing trained models to understand the working mechanism of SoM. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/zzxslp/SoM-LLaVA.

Following the success of Large Language Models (LLMs), expanding their boundaries to new modalities represents a significant paradigm shift in multimodal understanding. Human perception is inherently multimodal, relying not only on text but also on auditory and visual cues for a complete understanding of the world. In recognition of this fact, audio-visual LLMs have recently emerged. Despite promising developments, the lack of dedicated benchmarks poses challenges for understanding and evaluating models. In this work, we show that audio-visual LLMs struggle to discern subtle relationships between audio and visual signals, leading to hallucinations, underscoring the need for reliable benchmarks. To address this, we introduce AVHBench, the first comprehensive benchmark specifically designed to evaluate the perception and comprehension capabilities of audio-visual LLMs. Our benchmark includes tests for assessing hallucinations, as well as the cross-modal matching and reasoning abilities of these models. Our results reveal that most existing audio-visual LLMs struggle with hallucinations caused by cross-interactions between modalities, due to their limited capacity to perceive complex multimodal signals and their relationships. Additionally, we demonstrate that simple training with our AVHBench improves robustness of audio-visual LLMs against hallucinations.

Image memorability, i.e., how likely an image is to be remembered, has traditionally been studied in computer vision either as a passive prediction task, with models regressing a scalar score, or with generative methods altering the visual input to boost the image likelihood of being remembered. Yet, none of these paradigms supports users at capture time, when the crucial question is how to improve a photo memorability. We introduce the task of Memorability Feedback (MemFeed), where an automated model should provide actionable, human-interpretable guidance to users with the goal to enhance an image future recall. We also present MemCoach, the first approach designed to provide concrete suggestions in natural language for memorability improvement (e.g., "emphasize facial expression," "bring the subject forward"). Our method, based on Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), is training-free and employs a teacher-student steering strategy, aligning the model internal activations toward more memorable patterns learned from a teacher model progressing along least-to-most memorable samples. To enable systematic evaluation on this novel task, we further introduce MemBench, a new benchmark featuring sequence-aligned photoshoots with annotated memorability scores. Our experiments, considering multiple MLLMs, demonstrate the effectiveness of MemCoach, showing consistently improved performance over several zero-shot models. The results indicate that memorability can not only be predicted but also taught and instructed, shifting the focus from mere prediction to actionable feedback for human creators.

Large multimodal models (LMMs) "see" images by leveraging the attention mechanism between text and visual tokens in the transformer decoder. Ideally, these models should focus on key visual information relevant to the text token. However, recent findings indicate that LMMs have an extraordinary tendency to consistently allocate high attention weights to specific visual tokens, even when these tokens are irrelevant to the corresponding text. In this study, we investigate the property behind the appearance of these irrelevant visual tokens and examine their characteristics. Our findings show that this behavior arises due to the massive activation of certain hidden state dimensions, which resembles the attention sink found in language models. Hence, we refer to this phenomenon as the visual attention sink. In particular, our analysis reveals that removing the irrelevant visual sink tokens does not impact model performance, despite receiving high attention weights. Consequently, we recycle the attention to these tokens as surplus resources, redistributing the attention budget to enhance focus on the image. To achieve this, we introduce Visual Attention Redistribution (VAR), a method that redistributes attention in image-centric heads, which we identify as innately focusing on visual information. VAR can be seamlessly applied across different LMMs to improve performance on a wide range of tasks, including general vision-language tasks, visual hallucination tasks, and vision-centric tasks, all without the need for additional training, models, or inference steps. Experimental results demonstrate that VAR enables LMMs to process visual information more effectively by adjusting their internal attention mechanisms, offering a new direction to enhancing the multimodal capabilities of LMMs.

This paper introduces the sparse modular addition task and examines how transformers learn it. We focus on transformers with embeddings in R^2 and introduce a visual sandbox that provides comprehensive visualizations of each layer throughout the training process. We reveal a type of circuit, called "clustering heads," which learns the problem's invariants. We analyze the training dynamics of these circuits, highlighting two-stage learning, loss spikes due to high curvature or normalization layers, and the effects of initialization and curriculum learning.

The remarkable progress of vision-language models (VLMs) has enabled GUI agents to interact with computers in a human-like manner. Yet real-world computer-use tasks remain difficult due to long-horizon workflows, diverse interfaces, and frequent intermediate errors. Prior work equips agents with external memory built from large collections of trajectories, but relies on flat retrieval over discrete summaries or continuous embeddings, falling short of the structured organization and self-evolving characteristics of human memory. Inspired by the brain, we propose Hybrid Self-evolving Structured Memory (HyMEM), a graph-based memory that couples discrete high-level symbolic nodes with continuous trajectory embeddings. HyMEM maintains a graph structure to support multi-hop retrieval, self-evolution via node update operations, and on-the-fly working-memory refreshing during inference. Extensive experiments show that HyMEM consistently improves open-source GUI agents, enabling 7B/8B backbones to match or surpass strong closed-source models; notably, it boosts Qwen2.5-VL-7B by +22.5% and outperforms Gemini2.5-Pro-Vision and GPT-4o.

Large vision-language models (LVLMs) have made substantial progress in integrating large language models (LLMs) with visual inputs, enabling advanced multimodal reasoning. Despite their success, a persistent challenge is hallucination-where generated text fails to accurately reflect visual content-undermining both accuracy and reliability. Existing methods focus on alignment training or decoding refinements but primarily address symptoms at the generation stage without probing the underlying causes. In this work, we investigate the internal mechanisms driving hallucination in LVLMs, with an emphasis on the multi-head attention module. Specifically, we introduce Vision-aware Head Divergence (VHD), a metric that quantifies the sensitivity of attention head outputs to visual context. Based on this, our findings reveal the presence of vision-aware attention heads that are more attuned to visual information; however, the model's overreliance on its prior language patterns is closely related to hallucinations. Building on these insights, we propose Vision-aware Head Reinforcement (VHR), a training-free approach to mitigate hallucination by enhancing the role of vision-aware attention heads. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves superior performance compared to state-of-the-art approaches in mitigating hallucinations, while maintaining high efficiency with negligible additional time overhead.

The abilities to perceive, learn, and use generalities, similarities, classes, i.e., semantic memory (SM), is central to cognition. Machine learning (ML), neural network, and AI research has been primarily driven by tasks requiring such abilities. However, another central facet of cognition, single-trial formation of permanent memories of experiences, i.e., episodic memory (EM), has had relatively little focus. Only recently has EM-like functionality been added to Deep Learning (DL) models, e.g., Neural Turing Machine, Memory Networks. However, in these cases: a) EM is implemented as a separate module, which entails substantial data movement (and so, time and power) between the DL net itself and EM; and b) individual items are stored localistically within the EM, precluding realizing the exponential representational efficiency of distributed over localist coding. We describe Sparsey, an unsupervised, hierarchical, spatial/spatiotemporal associative memory model differing fundamentally from mainstream ML models, most crucially, in its use of sparse distributed representations (SDRs), or, cell assemblies, which admits an extremely efficient, single-trial learning algorithm that maps input similarity into code space similarity (measured as intersection). SDRs of individual inputs are stored in superposition and because similarity is preserved, the patterns of intersections over the assigned codes reflect the similarity, i.e., statistical, structure, of all orders, not simply pairwise, over the inputs. Thus, SM, i.e., a generative model, is built as a computationally free side effect of the act of storing episodic memory traces of individual inputs, either spatial patterns or sequences. We report initial results on MNIST and on the Weizmann video event recognition benchmarks. While we have not yet attained SOTA class accuracy, learning takes only minutes on a single CPU.

Constructing memory from users' long-term conversations overcomes LLMs' contextual limitations and enables personalized interactions. Recent studies focus on hierarchical memory to model users' multi-granular behavioral patterns via clustering and aggregating historical conversations. However, conversational noise and memory hallucinations can be amplified during clustering, causing locally aggregated memories to misalign with the user's global persona. To mitigate this issue, we propose Bi-Mem, an agentic framework ensuring hierarchical memory fidelity through bidirectional construction. Specifically, we deploy an inductive agent to form the hierarchical memory: it extracts factual information from raw conversations to form fact-level memory, aggregates them into thematic scenes (i.e., local scene-level memory) using graph clustering, and infers users' profiles as global persona-level memory. Simultaneously, a reflective agent is designed to calibrate local scene-level memories using global constraints derived from the persona-level memory, thereby enforcing global-local alignment. For coherent memory recall, we propose an associative retrieval mechanism: beyond initial hierarchical search, a spreading activation process allows facts to evoke contextual scenes, while scene-level matches retrieve salient supporting factual information. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that Bi-Mem achieves significant improvements in question answering performance on long-term personalized conversational tasks.

We present v1, a lightweight extension to Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) that enables selective visual revisitation during inference. While current MLLMs typically consume visual input only once and reason purely over internal memory, v1 introduces a simple point-and-copy mechanism that allows the model to dynamically retrieve relevant image regions throughout the reasoning process. This mechanism augments existing architectures with minimal modifications, enabling contextual access to visual tokens based on the model's evolving hypotheses. To train this capability, we construct v1g, a dataset of 300K multimodal reasoning traces with interleaved visual grounding annotations. Experiments on three multimodal mathematical reasoning benchmarks -- MathVista, MathVision, and MathVerse -- demonstrate that v1 consistently improves performance over comparable baselines, particularly on tasks requiring fine-grained visual reference and multi-step reasoning. Our results suggest that dynamic visual access is a promising direction for enhancing grounded multimodal reasoning. Code, models, and data will be released to support future research.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have advanced the integration of visual and linguistic modalities, establishing themselves as the dominant paradigm for visual-language tasks. Current approaches like chain of thought (CoT) reasoning have augmented the cognitive capabilities of large language models (LLMs), yet their adaptation to MLLMs is hindered by heightened risks of hallucination in cross-modality comprehension. In this paper, we find that the thinking while looking paradigm in current multimodal CoT approaches--where reasoning chains are generated alongside visual input--fails to mitigate hallucinations caused by misleading images. To address these limitations, we propose the Visual Inference Chain (VIC) framework, a novel approach that constructs reasoning chains using textual context alone before introducing visual input, effectively reducing cross-modal biases and enhancing multimodal reasoning accuracy. Comprehensive evaluations demonstrate that VIC significantly improves zero-shot performance across various vision-related tasks, mitigating hallucinations while refining the reasoning capabilities of MLLMs. Our code repository can be found at https://github.com/Terry-Xu-666/visual_inference_chain.

We present VISPROG, a neuro-symbolic approach to solving complex and compositional visual tasks given natural language instructions. VISPROG avoids the need for any task-specific training. Instead, it uses the in-context learning ability of large language models to generate python-like modular programs, which are then executed to get both the solution and a comprehensive and interpretable rationale. Each line of the generated program may invoke one of several off-the-shelf computer vision models, image processing routines, or python functions to produce intermediate outputs that may be consumed by subsequent parts of the program. We demonstrate the flexibility of VISPROG on 4 diverse tasks - compositional visual question answering, zero-shot reasoning on image pairs, factual knowledge object tagging, and language-guided image editing. We believe neuro-symbolic approaches like VISPROG are an exciting avenue to easily and effectively expand the scope of AI systems to serve the long tail of complex tasks that people may wish to perform.

Recent studies have shown that agent-based systems leveraging large language models (LLMs) for key information retrieval and integration have emerged as a promising approach for long video understanding. However, these systems face two major challenges. First, they typically perform modeling and reasoning on individual frames, struggling to capture the temporal context of consecutive frames. Second, to reduce the cost of dense frame-level captioning, they adopt sparse frame sampling, which risks discarding crucial information. To overcome these limitations, we propose VideoLucy, a deep memory backtracking framework for long video understanding. Inspired by the human recollection process from coarse to fine, VideoLucy employs a hierarchical memory structure with progressive granularity. This structure explicitly defines the detail level and temporal scope of memory at different hierarchical depths. Through an agent-based iterative backtracking mechanism, VideoLucy systematically mines video-wide, question-relevant deep memories until sufficient information is gathered to provide a confident answer. This design enables effective temporal understanding of consecutive frames while preserving critical details. In addition, we introduce EgoMem, a new benchmark for long video understanding. EgoMem is designed to comprehensively evaluate a model's ability to understand complex events that unfold over time and capture fine-grained details in extremely long videos. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of VideoLucy. Built on open-source models, VideoLucy significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods on multiple long video understanding benchmarks, achieving performance even surpassing the latest proprietary models such as GPT-4o. Our code and dataset will be made publicly at https://videolucy.github.io

Existing LLM test-time scaling laws emphasize the emergence of self-reflective behaviors through extended reasoning length. Nevertheless, this vertical scaling strategy often encounters plateaus in exploration as the model becomes locked into specific thinking pattern. By shifting from depth to parallelism, parallel thinking mitigates the narrowing of exploration. However, the extension of this paradigm to visual domain remains an open research question. In this paper, we first examine the role of visual partitioning in parallelized reasoning and subsequently propose two distinct strategies. Based on the above, we introduce Visual Para-Thinker, representing the inaugural parallel reasoning framework for MLLMs. To maintain path independence and promote diversity in reasoning, our approach integrates Pa-Attention alongside LPRoPE. Leveraging the vLLM framework, we have developed a native multimodal implementation that facilitates high-efficiency parallel processing. Empirical results on benchmark datasets such as V*, CountBench, RefCOCO, and HallusionBench confirm that Visual Para-Thinker successfully extends the benefits of parallel reasoning to the visual domain.

A modular design encourages neural models to disentangle and recombine different facets of knowledge to generalise more systematically to new tasks. In this work, we assume that each task is associated with a subset of latent discrete skills from a (potentially small) inventory. In turn, skills correspond to parameter-efficient (sparse / low-rank) model parameterisations. By jointly learning these and a task-skill allocation matrix, the network for each task is instantiated as the average of the parameters of active skills. To favour non-trivial soft partitions of skills across tasks, we experiment with a series of inductive biases, such as an Indian Buffet Process prior and a two-speed learning rate. We evaluate our latent-skill model on two main settings: 1) multitask reinforcement learning for grounded instruction following on 8 levels of the BabyAI platform; and 2) few-shot adaptation of pre-trained text-to-text generative models on CrossFit, a benchmark comprising 160 NLP tasks. We find that the modular design of a network significantly increases sample efficiency in reinforcement learning and few-shot generalisation in supervised learning, compared to baselines with fully shared, task-specific, or conditionally generated parameters where knowledge is entangled across tasks. In addition, we show how discrete skills help interpretability, as they yield an explicit hierarchy of tasks.

Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have recently demonstrated remarkable visual understanding performance on both vision-language and vision-centric tasks. However, they often fall short in integrating advanced, task-specific capabilities for compositional reasoning, which hinders their progress toward truly competent general vision models. To address this, we present a unified visual reasoning mechanism that enables LMMs to solve complicated compositional problems by leveraging their intrinsic capabilities (e.g. grounding and visual understanding capabilities). Different from the previous shortcut learning mechanism, our approach introduces a human-like understanding-thinking-answering process, allowing the model to complete all steps in a single pass forwarding without the need for multiple inferences or external tools. This design bridges the gap between foundational visual capabilities and general question answering, encouraging LMMs to generate faithful and traceable responses for complex visual reasoning. Meanwhile, we curate 334K visual instruction samples covering both general scenes and text-rich scenes and involving multiple foundational visual capabilities. Our trained model, Griffon-R, has the ability of end-to-end automatic understanding, self-thinking, and reasoning answers. Comprehensive experiments show that Griffon-R not only achieves advancing performance on complex visual reasoning benchmarks including VSR and CLEVR, but also enhances multimodal capabilities across various benchmarks like MMBench and ScienceQA. Data, models, and codes will be release at https://github.com/jefferyZhan/Griffon/tree/master/Griffon-R soon.

Recent advancements in Large Vision-Language Models built upon Large Language Models have established aligning visual features with LLM representations as the dominant paradigm. However, inherited LLM architectural designs introduce suboptimal characteristics for multimodal processing. First, LVLMs exhibit a bimodal distribution in attention allocation, leading to the progressive neglect of middle visual content as context expands. Second, conventional positional encoding schemes fail to preserve vital 2D structural relationships when processing dynamic high-resolution images. To address these limitations, we propose CoMemo - a dual-path architecture that combines a Context image path with an image Memory path for visual processing, effectively alleviating visual information neglect. Additionally, we introduce RoPE-DHR, a novel positional encoding mechanism that employs thumbnail-based positional aggregation to maintain 2D spatial awareness while mitigating remote decay in extended sequences. Evaluations across seven benchmarks,including long-context comprehension, multi-image reasoning, and visual question answering, demonstrate CoMemo's superior performance compared to conventional LVLM architectures. Project page is available at https://lalbj.github.io/projects/CoMemo/.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) excel at complex visual tasks such as VQA and chart understanding, yet recent work suggests they struggle with simple perceptual tests. We present an evaluation of vision-language models' capacity for nonlocal visual reasoning: reasoning that requires chaining evidence collected from multiple, possibly distant regions of an image. We isolate three distinct forms of nonlocal vision: comparative perception, which demands holding two images in working memory and comparing them; saccadic search, which requires making discrete, evidence-driven jumps to locate successive targets; and smooth visual search, which involves following a continuous contour. Flagship models (e.g., GPT-5, Gemini 2.5 Pro, Claude Sonnet 4), even those that perform well on prior primitive-vision benchmarks, fail these tests and barely exceed random accuracy on two variants of our tasks that are trivial for humans. Our structured evaluation suite allows us to test whether VLMs can perform visual algorithms similar to those used by humans. Our findings show that despite gains in raw visual acuity, current models lack core visual reasoning capabilities.

We present a framework that formulates visual question answering as modular code generation. In contrast to prior work on modular approaches to VQA, our approach requires no additional training and relies on pre-trained language models (LMs), visual models pre-trained on image-caption pairs, and fifty VQA examples used for in-context learning. The generated Python programs invoke and compose the outputs of the visual models using arithmetic and conditional logic. Our approach improves accuracy on the COVR dataset by at least 3% and on the GQA dataset by roughly 2% compared to the few-shot baseline that does not employ code generation.

Transformers have become the go-to architecture for language and vision tasks, yet their theoretical properties, especially memorization capacity, remain elusive. This paper investigates the memorization abilities of multi-head attention mechanisms, examining how many example sequences they can memorize, as a function of the number of heads and sequence length. Motivated by experimental findings on vision transformers, we introduce novel assumptions about the linear independence of input data, distinct from the commonly used general-position assumption. Under these assumptions, we demonstrate that an attention layer with H heads, dimension d, and context size n < d, featuring Theta(Hd^2) parameters, can memorize Omega(Hn) examples. Our analysis sheds light on how different attention heads handle various example sequences, aided by the softmax operator's saturation property. We validate our findings through experiments on synthetic data.

The advent of large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) has significantly advanced multimodal understanding, enabling more sophisticated and accurate integration of visual and textual information across various tasks, including image and video captioning, visual question answering, and cross-modal retrieval. Despite VLMs' superior capabilities, researchers lack a comprehensive understanding of their compositionality -- the ability to understand and produce novel combinations of known visual and textual components. Prior benchmarks provide only a relatively rough compositionality evaluation from the perspectives of objects, relations, and attributes while neglecting deeper reasoning about object interactions, counting, and complex compositions. However, compositionality is a critical ability that facilitates coherent reasoning and understanding across modalities for VLMs. To address this limitation, we propose MMCOMPOSITION, a novel human-annotated benchmark for comprehensively and accurately evaluating VLMs' compositionality. Our proposed benchmark serves as a complement to these earlier works. With MMCOMPOSITION, we can quantify and explore the compositionality of the mainstream VLMs. Surprisingly, we find GPT-4o's compositionality inferior to the best open-source model, and we analyze the underlying reasons. Our experimental analysis reveals the limitations of VLMs in fine-grained compositional perception and reasoning, and points to areas for improvement in VLM design and training. Resources available at: https://hanghuacs.github.io/MMComposition/

Under pure textual modality, Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable success in complex reasoning tasks by decomposing them into simpler sub-problems. However, Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) still struggle with some seemingly straightforward visual tasks, such as counting and solving jigsaw puzzles. We argue that these tasks challenge the ability of visual-to-textual conversion, where MLLMs convert visual information perceived from the input scene, to textual information for further reasoning and generating the answer. If the complexity of the visual input is beyond the perceptual capability of the MLLMs, without decomposing this conversion process, simply scaling inference-time reasoning cannot solve the task because it repeatedly encounters the same perceptual bottleneck. We propose an approach, autonomous imagination, to enable MLLMs to iteratively modify visual inputs (e.g. isolating objects, rearranging puzzle pieces) into intermediate visual states, decomposing visual-to-textual conversion into closed-loop visual modification steps. We show that, without any retraining, MLLMs can now solve tasks initially beyond their perceptual capability, highlighting that closed-loop visual modification can be an effective way of decomposing the visual reasoning task into solvable substeps. Our code and data are released at https://future-item.github.io/autoimagine-site/.

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.

Memory serves as the pivotal nexus bridging past and future, providing both humans and AI systems with invaluable concepts and experience to navigate complex tasks. Recent research on autonomous agents has increasingly focused on designing efficient memory workflows by drawing on cognitive neuroscience. However, constrained by interdisciplinary barriers, existing works struggle to assimilate the essence of human memory mechanisms. To bridge this gap, we systematically synthesizes interdisciplinary knowledge of memory, connecting insights from cognitive neuroscience with LLM-driven agents. Specifically, we first elucidate the definition and function of memory along a progressive trajectory from cognitive neuroscience through LLMs to agents. We then provide a comparative analysis of memory taxonomy, storage mechanisms, and the complete management lifecycle from both biological and artificial perspectives. Subsequently, we review the mainstream benchmarks for evaluating agent memory. Additionally, we explore memory security from dual perspectives of attack and defense. Finally, we envision future research directions, with a focus on multimodal memory systems and skill acquisition.

Many complex tasks can be decomposed into simpler, independent parts. Discovering such underlying compositional structure has the potential to enable compositional generalization. Despite progress, our most powerful systems struggle to compose flexibly. It therefore seems natural to make models more modular to help capture the compositional nature of many tasks. However, it is unclear under which circumstances modular systems can discover hidden compositional structure. To shed light on this question, we study a teacher-student setting with a modular teacher where we have full control over the composition of ground truth modules. This allows us to relate the problem of compositional generalization to that of identification of the underlying modules. In particular we study modularity in hypernetworks representing a general class of multiplicative interactions. We show theoretically that identification up to linear transformation purely from demonstrations is possible without having to learn an exponential number of module combinations. We further demonstrate empirically that under the theoretically identified conditions, meta-learning from finite data can discover modular policies that generalize compositionally in a number of complex environments.

Making neural networks remember over the long term has been a longstanding issue. Although several external memory techniques have been introduced, most focus on retaining recent information in the short term. Regardless of its importance, information tends to be fatefully forgotten over time. We present Memoria, a memory system for artificial neural networks, drawing inspiration from humans and applying various neuroscientific and psychological theories. The experimental results prove the effectiveness of Memoria in the diverse tasks of sorting, language modeling, and classification, surpassing conventional techniques. Engram analysis reveals that Memoria exhibits the primacy, recency, and temporal contiguity effects which are characteristics of human memory.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have been shown to be blind, often underutilizing their visual inputs even on tasks that require visual reasoning. In this work, we demonstrate that VLMs are selectively blind. They modulate the amount of attention applied to visual inputs based on linguistic framing even when alternative framings demand identical visual reasoning. Using visual attention as a probe, we quantify how framing alters both the amount and distribution of attention over the image. Constrained framings, such as multiple choice and yes/no, induce substantially lower attention to image context compared to open-ended, reduce focus on task-relevant regions, and shift attention towards uninformative tokens. We further demonstrate that this attention misallocation is the principal cause of degraded accuracy and cross-framing inconsistency. Building on this mechanistic insight, we introduce a lightweight prompt-tuning method using learnable tokens that encourages the robust, visually grounded attention patterns observed in open-ended settings, improving visual grounding and improving performance across framings.

Despite their powerful chat, coding, and reasoning abilities, Large Language Models (LLMs) frequently hallucinate. Conventional wisdom suggests that hallucinations are a consequence of a balance between creativity and factuality, which can be mitigated, but not eliminated, by grounding the LLM in external knowledge sources. Through extensive systematic experiments, we show that these traditional approaches fail to explain why LLMs hallucinate in practice. Specifically, we show that LLMs augmented with a massive Mixture of Memory Experts (MoME) can easily memorize large datasets of random numbers. We corroborate these experimental findings with a theoretical construction showing that simple neural networks trained to predict the next token hallucinate when the training loss is above a threshold as it usually does in practice when training on internet scale data. We interpret our findings by comparing against traditional retrieval methods for mitigating hallucinations. We use our findings to design a first generation model for removing hallucinations -- Lamini-1 -- that stores facts in a massive mixture of millions of memory experts that are retrieved dynamically.

Training a neural network is a monolithic endeavor, akin to carving knowledge into stone: once the process is completed, editing the knowledge in a network is nearly impossible, since all information is distributed across the network's weights. We here explore a simple, compelling alternative by marrying the representational power of deep neural networks with the flexibility of a database. Decomposing the task of image classification into image similarity (from a pre-trained embedding) and search (via fast nearest neighbor retrieval from a knowledge database), we build a simple and flexible visual memory that has the following key capabilities: (1.) The ability to flexibly add data across scales: from individual samples all the way to entire classes and billion-scale data; (2.) The ability to remove data through unlearning and memory pruning; (3.) An interpretable decision-mechanism on which we can intervene to control its behavior. Taken together, these capabilities comprehensively demonstrate the benefits of an explicit visual memory. We hope that it might contribute to a conversation on how knowledge should be represented in deep vision models -- beyond carving it in ``stone'' weights.

Multimodal reasoning requires iterative coordination between language and vision, yet it remains unclear what constitutes a meaningful interleaved chain of thought. We posit that text and image thoughts should function as complementary, rather than isomorphic, modalities that mutually advance reasoning. Guided by this principle, we build ThinkMorph, a unified model fine-tuned on 24K high-quality interleaved reasoning traces spanning tasks with varying visual engagement. ThinkMorph learns to generate progressive text-image reasoning steps that concretely manipulate visual content while maintaining coherent verbal logic. It delivers large gains on vision-centric benchmarks (averaging 34.7% over the base model) and generalizes to out-of-domain tasks, matching or surpassing larger and proprietary VLMs. Beyond performance, ThinkMorph exhibits emergent multimodal intelligence, including unseen visual manipulation skills, adaptive switching between reasoning modes, and better test-time scaling through diversified multimodal thoughts.These findings suggest promising directions for characterizing the emergent capabilities of unified models for multimodal reasoning.

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has significantly advanced the reasoning ability of vision-language models (VLMs). However, the inherent text-dominated nature of VLMs often leads to insufficient visual faithfulness, characterized by sparse attention activation to visual tokens. More importantly, our empirical analysis reveals that temporal visual forgetting along reasoning steps exacerbates this deficiency. To bridge this gap, we propose Visually-Guided Policy Optimization (VGPO), a novel framework to reinforce visual focus during policy optimization. Specifically, VGPO initially introduces a Visual Attention Compensation mechanism that leverages visual similarity to localize and amplify visual cues, while progressively elevating visual expectations in later steps to counteract visual forgetting. Building on this mechanism, we implement a dual-grained advantage re-weighting strategy: the intra-trajectory level highlights tokens exhibiting relatively high visual activation, while the inter-trajectory level prioritizes trajectories demonstrating superior visual accumulation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that VGPO achieves better visual activation and superior performance in mathematical multimodal reasoning and visual-dependent tasks.

Humans tend to decompose a sentence into different parts like sth do sth at someplace and then fill each part with certain content. Inspired by this, we follow the principle of modular design to propose a novel image captioner: learning to Collocate Visual-Linguistic Neural Modules (CVLNM). Unlike the widely used neural module networks in VQA, where the language (\ie, question) is fully observable, the task of collocating visual-linguistic modules is more challenging. This is because the language is only partially observable, for which we need to dynamically collocate the modules during the process of image captioning. To sum up, we make the following technical contributions to design and train our CVLNM: 1) distinguishable module design -- four modules in the encoder including one linguistic module for function words and three visual modules for different content words (\ie, noun, adjective, and verb) and another linguistic one in the decoder for commonsense reasoning, 2) a self-attention based module controller for robustifying the visual reasoning, 3) a part-of-speech based syntax loss imposed on the module controller for further regularizing the training of our CVLNM. Extensive experiments on the MS-COCO dataset show that our CVLNM is more effective, \eg, achieving a new state-of-the-art 129.5 CIDEr-D, and more robust, \eg, being less likely to overfit to dataset bias and suffering less when fewer training samples are available. Codes are available at https://github.com/GCYZSL/CVLMN

Memory is critical for long-horizon and history-dependent robotic manipulation. Such tasks often involve counting repeated actions or manipulating objects that become temporarily occluded. Recent vision-language-action (VLA) models have begun to incorporate memory mechanisms; however, their evaluations remain confined to narrow, non-standardized settings. This limits their systematic understanding, comparison, and progress measurement. To address these challenges, we introduce RoboMME: a large-scale standardized benchmark for evaluating and advancing VLA models in long-horizon, history-dependent scenarios. Our benchmark comprises 16 manipulation tasks constructed under a carefully designed taxonomy that evaluates temporal, spatial, object, and procedural memory. We further develop a suite of 14 memory-augmented VLA variants built on the π0.5 backbone to systematically explore different memory representations across multiple integration strategies. Experimental results show that the effectiveness of memory representations is highly task-dependent, with each design offering distinct advantages and limitations across different tasks. Videos and code can be found at our website https://robomme.github.io.

Designing efficient and effective architectural backbones has been in the core of research efforts to enhance the capability of foundation models. Inspired by the human cognitive phenomenon of attentional bias-the natural tendency to prioritize certain events or stimuli-we reconceptualize neural architectures, including Transformers, Titans, and modern linear recurrent neural networks as associative memory modules that learn a mapping of keys and values using an internal objective, referred to as attentional bias. Surprisingly, we observed that most existing sequence models leverage either (1) dot-product similarity, or (2) L2 regression objectives as their attentional bias. Going beyond these objectives, we present a set of alternative attentional bias configurations along with their effective approximations to stabilize their training procedure. We then reinterpret forgetting mechanisms in modern deep learning architectures as a form of retention regularization, providing a novel set of forget gates for sequence models. Building upon these insights, we present Miras, a general framework to design deep learning architectures based on four choices of: (i) associative memory architecture, (ii) attentional bias objective, (iii) retention gate, and (iv) memory learning algorithm. We present three novel sequence models-Moneta, Yaad, and Memora-that go beyond the power of existing linear RNNs while maintaining a fast parallelizable training process. Our experiments show different design choices in Miras yield models with varying strengths. For example, certain instances of Miras achieve exceptional performance in special tasks such as language modeling, commonsense reasoning, and recall intensive tasks, even outperforming Transformers and other modern linear recurrent models.

Recent works have shown that Large Language Models (LLMs) could empower traditional neuro-symbolic models via programming capabilities to translate language into module descriptions, thus achieving strong visual reasoning results while maintaining the model's transparency and efficiency. However, these models usually exhaustively generate the entire code snippet given each new instance of a task, which is extremely ineffective. We propose generative neuro-symbolic visual reasoning by growing and reusing modules. Specifically, our model consists of three unique stages, module initialization, module generation, and module execution. First, given a vision-language task, we adopt LLMs to examine whether we could reuse and grow over established modules to handle this new task. If not, we initialize a new module needed by the task and specify the inputs and outputs of this new module. After that, the new module is created by querying LLMs to generate corresponding code snippets that match the requirements. In order to get a better sense of the new module's ability, we treat few-shot training examples as test cases to see if our new module could pass these cases. If yes, the new module is added to the module library for future reuse. Finally, we evaluate the performance of our model on the testing set by executing the parsed programs with the newly made visual modules to get the results. We find the proposed model possesses several advantages. First, it performs competitively on standard tasks like visual question answering and referring expression comprehension; Second, the modules learned from one task can be seamlessly transferred to new tasks; Last but not least, it is able to adapt to new visual reasoning tasks by observing a few training examples and reusing modules.

We present a model that can perform multiple vision tasks and can be adapted to other downstream tasks efficiently. Despite considerable progress in multi-task learning, most efforts focus on learning from multi-label data: a single image set with multiple task labels. Such multi-label data sets are rare, small, and expensive. We say heterogeneous to refer to image sets with different task labels, or to combinations of single-task datasets. Few have explored training on such heterogeneous datasets. General-purpose vision models are still dominated by single-task pretraining, and it remains unclear how to scale up multi-task models by leveraging mainstream vision datasets designed for different purposes. The challenges lie in managing large intrinsic differences among vision tasks, including data distribution, architectures, task-specific modules, dataset scales, and sampling strategies. To address these challenges, we propose to modify and scale up mixture-of-experts (MoE) vision transformers, so that they can simultaneously learn classification, detection, and segmentation on diverse mainstream vision datasets including ImageNet, COCO, and ADE20K. Our approach achieves comparable results to single-task state-of-the-art models and demonstrates strong generalization on downstream tasks. Due to its emergent modularity, this general-purpose model decomposes into high-performing components, efficiently adapting to downstream tasks. We can fine-tune it with fewer training parameters, fewer model parameters, and less computation. Additionally, its modularity allows for easy expansion in continual-learning-without-forgetting scenarios. Finally, these functions can be controlled and combined to meet various demands of downstream tasks.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) such as GPT-4V have recently demonstrated incredible strides on diverse vision language tasks. We dig into vision-based deductive reasoning, a more sophisticated but less explored realm, and find previously unexposed blindspots in the current SOTA VLMs. Specifically, we leverage Raven's Progressive Matrices (RPMs), to assess VLMs' abilities to perform multi-hop relational and deductive reasoning relying solely on visual clues. We perform comprehensive evaluations of several popular VLMs employing standard strategies such as in-context learning, self-consistency, and Chain-of-thoughts (CoT) on three diverse datasets, including the Mensa IQ test, IntelligenceTest, and RAVEN. The results reveal that despite the impressive capabilities of LLMs in text-based reasoning, we are still far from achieving comparable proficiency in visual deductive reasoning. We found that certain standard strategies that are effective when applied to LLMs do not seamlessly translate to the challenges presented by visual reasoning tasks. Moreover, a detailed analysis reveals that VLMs struggle to solve these tasks mainly because they are unable to perceive and comprehend multiple, confounding abstract patterns in RPM examples.

Advancements in LLMs have recently unveiled challenges tied to computational efficiency and continual scalability due to their requirements of huge parameters, making the applications and evolution of these models on devices with limited computation resources and scenarios requiring various abilities increasingly cumbersome. Inspired by modularity within the human brain, there is a growing tendency to decompose LLMs into numerous functional modules, allowing for inference with part of modules and dynamic assembly of modules to tackle complex tasks, such as mixture-of-experts. To highlight the inherent efficiency and composability of the modular approach, we coin the term brick to represent each functional module, designating the modularized structure as configurable foundation models. In this paper, we offer a comprehensive overview and investigation of the construction, utilization, and limitation of configurable foundation models. We first formalize modules into emergent bricks - functional neuron partitions that emerge during the pre-training phase, and customized bricks - bricks constructed via additional post-training to improve the capabilities and knowledge of LLMs. Based on diverse functional bricks, we further present four brick-oriented operations: retrieval and routing, merging, updating, and growing. These operations allow for dynamic configuration of LLMs based on instructions to handle complex tasks. To verify our perspective, we conduct an empirical analysis on widely-used LLMs. We find that the FFN layers follow modular patterns with functional specialization of neurons and functional neuron partitions. Finally, we highlight several open issues and directions for future research. Overall, this paper aims to offer a fresh modular perspective on existing LLM research and inspire the future creation of more efficient and scalable foundational models.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) that integrate visual and textual reasoning leverage chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting to tackle complex visual tasks, yet continue to exhibit visual hallucinations and an over-reliance on textual priors. We present a systematic diagnosis of state-of-the-art vision-language models using a three-stage evaluation framework, uncovering key failure modes. To address these, we propose an agent-based architecture that combines LLM reasoning with lightweight visual modules, enabling fine-grained analysis and iterative refinement of reasoning chains. Our results highlight future visual reasoning models should focus on integrating a broader set of specialized tools for analyzing visual content. Our system achieves significant gains (+10.3 on MMMU, +6.0 on MathVista over a 7B baseline), matching or surpassing much larger models. We will release our framework and evaluation suite to facilitate future research.

Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in understanding and describing visual content, achieving state-of-the-art performance across various vision-language tasks. However, these models frequently exhibit hallucination behavior, where they generate descriptions containing objects or details absent in the input image. Our work investigates this phenomenon by analyzing attention patterns across transformer layers and heads, revealing that hallucinations often stem from progressive degradation of visual grounding in deeper layers. We propose a novel attention modification approach that combines selective token emphasis and head-specific modulation to maintain visual grounding throughout the generation process. Our method introduces two key components: (1) a dual-stream token selection mechanism that identifies and prioritizes both locally informative and spatially significant visual tokens, and (2) an attention head-specific modulation strategy that differentially amplifies visual information processing based on measured visual sensitivity of individual attention heads. Through extensive experimentation on the MSCOCO dataset, we demonstrate that our approach reduces hallucination rates by up to 62.3\% compared to baseline models while maintaining comparable task performance. Our analysis reveals that selectively modulating tokens across attention heads with varying levels of visual sensitivity can significantly improve visual grounding without requiring model retraining.

This paper examines memory mechanisms in Large Language Models (LLMs), emphasizing their importance for context-rich responses, reduced hallucinations, and improved efficiency. It categorizes memory into sensory, short-term, and long-term, with sensory memory corresponding to input prompts, short-term memory processing immediate context, and long-term memory implemented via external databases or structures. The text-based memory section covers acquisition (selection and summarization), management (updating, accessing, storing, and resolving conflicts), and utilization (full-text search, SQL queries, semantic search). The KV cache-based memory section discusses selection methods (regularity-based summarization, score-based approaches, special token embeddings) and compression techniques (low-rank compression, KV merging, multimodal compression), along with management strategies like offloading and shared attention mechanisms. Parameter-based memory methods (LoRA, TTT, MoE) transform memories into model parameters to enhance efficiency, while hidden-state-based memory approaches (chunk mechanisms, recurrent transformers, Mamba model) improve long-text processing by combining RNN hidden states with current methods. Overall, the paper offers a comprehensive analysis of LLM memory mechanisms, highlighting their significance and future research directions.

The recent advancements in generative language models have demonstrated their ability to memorize knowledge from documents and recall knowledge to respond to user queries effectively. Building upon this capability, we propose to enable multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to memorize and recall images within their parameters. Given a user query for visual content, the MLLM is anticipated to "recall" the relevant image from its parameters as the response. Achieving this target presents notable challenges, including inbuilt visual memory and visual recall schemes within MLLMs. To address these challenges, we introduce a generative cross-modal retrieval framework, which assigns unique identifier strings to represent images and involves two training steps: learning to memorize and learning to retrieve. The first step focuses on training the MLLM to memorize the association between images and their respective identifiers. The latter step teaches the MLLM to generate the corresponding identifier of the target image, given the textual query input. By memorizing images in MLLMs, we introduce a new paradigm to cross-modal retrieval, distinct from previous discriminative approaches. The experiments demonstrate that the generative paradigm performs effectively and efficiently even with large-scale image candidate sets.

Large language models have recently shown human level performance on a variety of reasoning tasks. However, the ability of these models to perform complex visual reasoning has not been studied in detail yet. A key challenge in many visual reasoning tasks is that the visual information needs to be tightly integrated in the reasoning process. We propose to address this challenge by drawing inspiration from human visual problem solving which depends on a variety of low-level visual capabilities. It can often be cast as the three step-process of ``Look, Remember, Reason'': visual information is incrementally extracted using low-level visual routines in a step-by-step fashion until a final answer is reached. We follow the same paradigm to enable existing large language models, with minimal changes to the architecture, to solve visual reasoning problems. To this end, we introduce rationales over the visual input that allow us to integrate low-level visual capabilities, such as object recognition and tracking, as surrogate tasks. We show competitive performance on diverse visual reasoning tasks from the CLEVR, CATER, and ACRE datasets over state-of-the-art models designed specifically for these tasks.

This paper reveals that many state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) lack hierarchical knowledge about our visual world, unaware of even well-established biology taxonomies. This shortcoming makes LLMs a bottleneck for vision LLMs' hierarchical visual understanding (e.g., recognizing Anemone Fish but not Vertebrate). We arrive at these findings using about one million four-choice visual question answering (VQA) tasks constructed from six taxonomies and four image datasets. Interestingly, finetuning a vision LLM using our VQA tasks reaffirms LLMs' bottleneck effect to some extent because the VQA tasks improve the LLM's hierarchical consistency more than the vision LLM's. We conjecture that one cannot make vision LLMs understand visual concepts fully hierarchical until LLMs possess corresponding taxonomy knowledge.

Multimodal foundation models (MFMs) have demonstrated significant success in tasks such as visual captioning, question answering, and image-text retrieval. However, these models face inherent limitations due to their finite internal capacity, which restricts their ability to process extended temporal sequences, a crucial requirement for comprehensive video and audio analysis. To overcome these challenges, we introduce a specialized cognitive module, temporal working memory (TWM), which aims to enhance the temporal modeling capabilities of MFMs. It selectively retains task-relevant information across temporal dimensions, ensuring that critical details are preserved throughout the processing of video and audio content. The TWM uses a query-guided attention approach to focus on the most informative multimodal segments within temporal sequences. By retaining only the most relevant content, TWM optimizes the use of the model's limited capacity, enhancing its temporal modeling ability. This plug-and-play module can be easily integrated into existing MFMs. With our TWM, nine state-of-the-art models exhibit significant performance improvements across tasks such as video captioning, question answering, and video-text retrieval. By enhancing temporal modeling, TWM extends the capability of MFMs to handle complex, time-sensitive data effectively. Our code is available at https://github.com/xid32/NAACL_2025_TWM.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have achieved remarkable progress on a wide range of challenging multimodal understanding and reasoning tasks. However, existing reasoning paradigms, such as the classical Chain-of-Thought (CoT), rely solely on textual information and often underutilize important visual cues. While prior work has incorporated pixel-level visual cues, these representations require precise spatial localization, introducing additional learning complexity. To address this, we propose PatchCue, a novel patch-based visual cue paradigm designed to significantly enhance the visual reasoning capabilities of VLMs. By partitioning images into patches and representing cues at the patch level, PatchCue aligns better with human perceptual habits and leverages the patch-tokenized input of modern VLMs. We train VLMs using a two-stage approach: cold-start supervised fine-tuning to output patch-level cues, followed by reinforcement learning with a process-supervised cue reward that guides intermediate visual reasoning steps. Extensive experiments on multiple VLMs and diverse benchmarks, including general visual question answering, complex reasoning, and document understanding, demonstrate that PatchCue consistently improves overall model performance. Our results show that patch-level cues outperform both pixel-level bounding boxes and point-based cues, providing a more effective and cognitively aligned visual reasoning paradigm.

Emerging world models autoregressively generate video frames in response to actions, such as camera movements and text prompts, among other control signals. Due to limited temporal context window sizes, these models often struggle to maintain scene consistency during revisits, leading to severe forgetting of previously generated environments. Inspired by the mechanisms of human memory, we introduce a novel framework to enhancing long-term consistency of video world models through a geometry-grounded long-term spatial memory. Our framework includes mechanisms to store and retrieve information from the long-term spatial memory and we curate custom datasets to train and evaluate world models with explicitly stored 3D memory mechanisms. Our evaluations show improved quality, consistency, and context length compared to relevant baselines, paving the way towards long-term consistent world generation.

Recent advancements in large multimodal models (LMMs) have significantly enhanced performance across diverse tasks, with ongoing efforts to further integrate additional modalities such as video and audio. However, most existing LMMs remain vulnerable to hallucinations, the discrepancy between the factual multimodal input and the generated textual output, which has limited their applicability in various real-world scenarios. This paper presents the first systematic investigation of hallucinations in LMMs involving the three most common modalities: language, visual, and audio. Our study reveals two key contributors to hallucinations: overreliance on unimodal priors and spurious inter-modality correlations. To address these challenges, we introduce the benchmark The Curse of Multi-Modalities (CMM), which comprehensively evaluates hallucinations in LMMs, providing a detailed analysis of their underlying issues. Our findings highlight key vulnerabilities, including imbalances in modality integration and biases from training data, underscoring the need for balanced cross-modal learning and enhanced hallucination mitigation strategies. Based on our observations and findings, we suggest potential research directions that could enhance the reliability of LMMs.

Hallucinations in large vision-language models (LVLMs) pose significant challenges for real-world applications, as LVLMs may generate responses that appear plausible yet remain inconsistent with the associated visual content. This issue rarely occurs in human cognition. We argue that this discrepancy arises from humans' ability to effectively leverage multimodal interaction information in data samples. Specifically, humans typically first gather multimodal information, analyze the interactions across modalities for understanding, and then express their understanding through language. Motivated by this observation, we conduct extensive experiments on popular LVLMs and obtained insights that surprisingly reveal human-like, though less pronounced, cognitive behavior of LVLMs on multimodal samples. Building on these findings, we further propose INTER: Interaction Guidance Sampling, a novel training-free algorithm that mitigate hallucinations without requiring additional data. Specifically, INTER explicitly guides LVLMs to effectively reapply their understanding of multimodal interaction information when generating responses, thereby reducing potential hallucinations. On six benchmarks including VQA and image captioning tasks, INTER achieves an average improvement of up to 3.4\% on five LVLMs compared to the state-of-the-art decoding strategy. The code will be released when the paper is accepted.

Modern Vision-Language Models (VLMs) remain poorly characterized in multi-step visual interactions, particularly in how they integrate perception, memory, and action over long horizons. We introduce VisGym, a gymnasium of 17 environments for evaluating and training VLMs. The suite spans symbolic puzzles, real-image understanding, navigation, and manipulation, and provides flexible controls over difficulty, input representation, planning horizon, and feedback. We also provide multi-step solvers that generate structured demonstrations, enabling supervised finetuning. Our evaluations show that all frontier models struggle in interactive settings, achieving low success rates in both the easy (46.6%) and hard (26.0%) configurations. Our experiments reveal notable limitations: models struggle to effectively leverage long context, performing worse with an unbounded history than with truncated windows. Furthermore, we find that several text-based symbolic tasks become substantially harder once rendered visually. However, explicit goal observations, textual feedback, and exploratory demonstrations in partially observable or unknown-dynamics settings for supervised finetuning yield consistent gains, highlighting concrete failure modes and pathways for improving multi-step visual decision-making. Code, data, and models can be found at: https://visgym.github.io/.

Multi-modality promises to unlock further uses for large language models. Recently, the state-of-the-art language model GPT-4 was enhanced with vision capabilities. We carry out a prompting evaluation of GPT-4V and five other baselines on structured reasoning tasks, such as mathematical reasoning, visual data analysis, and code generation. We show that visual Chain-of-Thought, an extension of Chain-of-Thought to multi-modal LLMs, yields significant improvements over the vanilla model. We also present a categorized analysis of scenarios where these models perform well and where they struggle, highlighting challenges associated with coherent multimodal reasoning.

Modular neural networks without additional training have recently been shown to surpass end-to-end neural networks on challenging vision-language tasks. The latest such methods simultaneously introduce LLM-based code generation to build programs and a number of skill-specific, task-oriented modules to execute them. In this paper, we focus on ViperGPT and ask where its additional performance comes from and how much is due to the (state-of-art, end-to-end) BLIP-2 model it subsumes vs. additional symbolic components. To do so, we conduct a controlled study (comparing end-to-end, modular, and prompting-based methods across several VQA benchmarks). We find that ViperGPT's reported gains over BLIP-2 can be attributed to its selection of task-specific modules, and when we run ViperGPT using a more task-agnostic selection of modules, these gains go away. Additionally, ViperGPT retains much of its performance if we make prominent alterations to its selection of modules: e.g. removing or retaining only BLIP-2. Finally, we compare ViperGPT against a prompting-based decomposition strategy and find that, on some benchmarks, modular approaches significantly benefit by representing subtasks with natural language, instead of code.

Video diffusion models are moving beyond short, plausible clips toward world simulators that must remain consistent under camera motion, revisits, and intervention. Yet spatial memory remains a key bottleneck: explicit 3D structures can improve reprojection-based consistency but struggle to depict moving objects, while implicit memory often produces inaccurate camera motion even with correct poses. We propose Mosaic Memory (MosaicMem), a hybrid spatial memory that lifts patches into 3D for reliable localization and targeted retrieval, while exploiting the model's native conditioning to preserve prompt-following generation. MosaicMem composes spatially aligned patches in the queried view via a patch-and-compose interface, preserving what should persist while allowing the model to inpaint what should evolve. With PRoPE camera conditioning and two new memory alignment methods, experiments show improved pose adherence compared to implicit memory and stronger dynamic modeling than explicit baselines. MosaicMem further enables minute-level navigation, memory-based scene editing, and autoregressive rollout.

Temporal context is essential for robotic manipulation because such tasks are inherently non-Markovian, yet mainstream VLA models typically overlook it and struggle with long-horizon, temporally dependent tasks. Cognitive science suggests that humans rely on working memory to buffer short-lived representations for immediate control, while the hippocampal system preserves verbatim episodic details and semantic gist of past experience for long-term memory. Inspired by these mechanisms, we propose MemoryVLA, a Cognition-Memory-Action framework for long-horizon robotic manipulation. A pretrained VLM encodes the observation into perceptual and cognitive tokens that form working memory, while a Perceptual-Cognitive Memory Bank stores low-level details and high-level semantics consolidated from it. Working memory retrieves decision-relevant entries from the bank, adaptively fuses them with current tokens, and updates the bank by merging redundancies. Using these tokens, a memory-conditioned diffusion action expert yields temporally aware action sequences. We evaluate MemoryVLA on 150+ simulation and real-world tasks across three robots. On SimplerEnv-Bridge, Fractal, and LIBERO-5 suites, it achieves 71.9%, 72.7%, and 96.5% success rates, respectively, all outperforming state-of-the-art baselines CogACT and pi-0, with a notable +14.6 gain on Bridge. On 12 real-world tasks spanning general skills and long-horizon temporal dependencies, MemoryVLA achieves 84.0% success rate, with long-horizon tasks showing a +26 improvement over state-of-the-art baseline. Project Page: https://shihao1895.github.io/MemoryVLA

Agent memory shapes how Large Language Model (LLM)-powered agents, akin to the human brain, progressively refine themselves through environment interactions. Existing paradigms remain constrained: parametric memory forcibly adjusts model parameters, and retrieval-based memory externalizes experience into structured databases, yet neither captures the fluid interweaving of reasoning and memory that underlies human cognition. To address this gap, we propose MemGen, a dynamic generative memory framework that equips agents with a human-esque cognitive faculty. It consists of a memory trigger, which monitors the agent's reasoning state to decide explicit memory invocation, and a memory weaver, which takes the agent's current state as stimulus to construct a latent token sequence as machine-native memory to enrich its reasoning. In this way, MemGen enables agents to recall and augment latent memory throughout reasoning, producing a tightly interwoven cycle of memory and cognition. Extensive experiments across eight benchmarks show that MemGen surpasses leading external memory systems such as ExpeL and AWM by up to 38.22%, exceeds GRPO by up to 13.44%, and exhibits strong cross-domain generalization ability. More importantly, we find that without explicit supervision, MemGen spontaneously evolves distinct human-like memory faculties, including planning memory, procedural memory, and working memory, suggesting an emergent trajectory toward more naturalistic forms of machine cognition.

As reasoning models scale rapidly, the essential role of multimodality in human cognition has come into sharp relief, driving a growing need to probe vision-centric cognitive behaviors. Yet, existing multimodal benchmarks either overemphasize textual reasoning or fall short of systematically capturing vision-centric cognitive behaviors, leaving the cognitive capacity of MLLMs insufficiently assessed. To address this limitation, we introduce MME-CC (Multi-Modal Evaluation benchmark of Cognitive Capacity), a vision-grounded benchmark that organizes 11 representative reasoning tasks into three fundamental categories of visual information: spatial, geometric, and knowledge-based reasoning, and provides fine-grained analyses of MLLMs' cognitive capacity across these dimensions. Based on MME-CC, we conduct extensive experiments over 16 representative MLLMs. Our study reveals that closed-source models currently lead overall (e.g., 42.66 for Gemini-2.5-Pro vs. 30.45 for GLM-4.5V), while spatial and geometric reasoning remain broadly weak (less than or equal to 30%). We further identify common error patterns, including orientation mistakes, fragile cross-view identity persistence, and poor adherence to counterfactual instructions, and observe that Chain-of-Thought typically follows a three-stage process (extract -> reason -> verify) with heavy reliance on visual extraction. We hope this work catalyzes a shift toward treating the cognitive capacity of MLLMs as central to both evaluation and model design.

The hallucination of large multimodal models (LMMs), providing responses that appear correct but are actually incorrect, limits their reliability and applicability. This paper aims to study the hallucination problem of LMMs in video modality, which is dynamic and more challenging compared to static modalities like images and text. From this motivation, we first present a comprehensive benchmark termed HAVEN for evaluating hallucinations of LMMs in video understanding tasks. It is built upon three dimensions, i.e., hallucination causes, hallucination aspects, and question formats, resulting in 6K questions. Then, we quantitatively study 7 influential factors on hallucinations, e.g., duration time of videos, model sizes, and model reasoning, via experiments of 16 LMMs on the presented benchmark. In addition, inspired by recent thinking models like OpenAI o1, we propose a video-thinking model to mitigate the hallucinations of LMMs via supervised reasoning fine-tuning (SRFT) and direct preference optimization (TDPO)-- where SRFT enhances reasoning capabilities while TDPO reduces hallucinations in the thinking process. Extensive experiments and analyses demonstrate the effectiveness. Remarkably, it improves the baseline by 7.65% in accuracy on hallucination evaluation and reduces the bias score by 4.5%. The code and data are public at https://github.com/Hongcheng-Gao/HAVEN.

Recent advancements in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable progress in visual understanding. This impressive leap raises a compelling question: how can language models, initially trained solely on linguistic data, effectively interpret and process visual content? This paper aims to address this question with systematic investigation across 4 model families and 4 model scales, uncovering a unique class of attention heads that focus specifically on visual content. Our analysis reveals a strong correlation between the behavior of these attention heads, the distribution of attention weights, and their concentration on visual tokens within the input. These findings enhance our understanding of how LLMs adapt to multimodal tasks, demonstrating their potential to bridge the gap between textual and visual understanding. This work paves the way for the development of AI systems capable of engaging with diverse modalities.

Auxiliary-free human video matting methods, which rely solely on input frames, often struggle with complex or ambiguous backgrounds. To address this, we propose MatAnyone, a robust framework tailored for target-assigned video matting. Specifically, building on a memory-based paradigm, we introduce a consistent memory propagation module via region-adaptive memory fusion, which adaptively integrates memory from the previous frame. This ensures semantic stability in core regions while preserving fine-grained details along object boundaries. For robust training, we present a larger, high-quality, and diverse dataset for video matting. Additionally, we incorporate a novel training strategy that efficiently leverages large-scale segmentation data, boosting matting stability. With this new network design, dataset, and training strategy, MatAnyone delivers robust and accurate video matting results in diverse real-world scenarios, outperforming existing methods.

Recent progress in multimodal reasoning has been significantly advanced by textual Chain-of-Thought (CoT), a paradigm where models conduct reasoning within language. This text-centric approach, however, treats vision as a static, initial context, creating a fundamental "semantic gap" between rich perceptual data and discrete symbolic thought. Human cognition often transcends language, utilizing vision as a dynamic mental sketchpad. A similar evolution is now unfolding in AI, marking a fundamental paradigm shift from models that merely think about images to those that can truly think with images. This emerging paradigm is characterized by models leveraging visual information as intermediate steps in their thought process, transforming vision from a passive input into a dynamic, manipulable cognitive workspace. In this survey, we chart this evolution of intelligence along a trajectory of increasing cognitive autonomy, which unfolds across three key stages: from external tool exploration, through programmatic manipulation, to intrinsic imagination. To structure this rapidly evolving field, our survey makes four key contributions. (1) We establish the foundational principles of the think with image paradigm and its three-stage framework. (2) We provide a comprehensive review of the core methods that characterize each stage of this roadmap. (3) We analyze the critical landscape of evaluation benchmarks and transformative applications. (4) We identify significant challenges and outline promising future directions. By providing this structured overview, we aim to offer a clear roadmap for future research towards more powerful and human-aligned multimodal AI.

The combination of strong visual backbones and Large Language Model (LLM) reasoning has led to Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) becoming the current standard for a wide range of vision and language (VL) tasks. However, recent research has shown that even the most advanced LMMs still struggle to capture aspects of compositional visual reasoning, such as attributes and relationships between objects. One solution is to utilize scene graphs (SGs)--a formalization of objects and their relations and attributes that has been extensively used as a bridge between the visual and textual domains. Yet, scene graph data requires scene graph annotations, which are expensive to collect and thus not easily scalable. Moreover, finetuning an LMM based on SG data can lead to catastrophic forgetting of the pretraining objective. To overcome this, inspired by chain-of-thought methods, we propose Compositional Chain-of-Thought (CCoT), a novel zero-shot Chain-of-Thought prompting method that utilizes SG representations in order to extract compositional knowledge from an LMM. Specifically, we first generate an SG using the LMM, and then use that SG in the prompt to produce a response. Through extensive experiments, we find that the proposed CCoT approach not only improves LMM performance on several vision and language VL compositional benchmarks but also improves the performance of several popular LMMs on general multimodal benchmarks, without the need for fine-tuning or annotated ground-truth SGs. Code: https://github.com/chancharikmitra/CCoT

Hallucination is a common issue in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), yet the underlying principles remain poorly understood. In this paper, we investigate which components of MLLMs contribute to object hallucinations. To analyze image representations while completely avoiding the influence of all other factors other than the image representation itself, we propose a parametric-free representation alignment metric (Pfram) that can measure the similarities between any two representation systems without requiring additional training parameters. Notably, Pfram can also assess the alignment of a neural representation system with the human representation system, represented by ground-truth annotations of images. By evaluating the alignment with object annotations, we demonstrate that this metric shows strong and consistent correlations with object hallucination across a wide range of state-of-the-art MLLMs, spanning various model architectures and sizes. Furthermore, using this metric, we explore other key issues related to image representations in MLLMs, such as the role of different modules, the impact of textual instructions, and potential improvements including the use of alternative visual encoders. Our code is available at: https://github.com/yellow-binary-tree/Pfram.

Video diffusion models have recently shown promise for world modeling through autoregressive frame prediction conditioned on actions. However, they struggle to maintain long-term memory due to the high computational cost associated with processing extended sequences in attention layers. To overcome this limitation, we propose a novel architecture leveraging state-space models (SSMs) to extend temporal memory without compromising computational efficiency. Unlike previous approaches that retrofit SSMs for non-causal vision tasks, our method fully exploits the inherent advantages of SSMs in causal sequence modeling. Central to our design is a block-wise SSM scanning scheme, which strategically trades off spatial consistency for extended temporal memory, combined with dense local attention to ensure coherence between consecutive frames. We evaluate the long-term memory capabilities of our model through spatial retrieval and reasoning tasks over extended horizons. Experiments on Memory Maze and Minecraft datasets demonstrate that our approach surpasses baselines in preserving long-range memory, while maintaining practical inference speeds suitable for interactive applications.

We introduce KiloGram, a resource for studying abstract visual reasoning in humans and machines. Drawing on the history of tangram puzzles as stimuli in cognitive science, we build a richly annotated dataset that, with >1k distinct stimuli, is orders of magnitude larger and more diverse than prior resources. It is both visually and linguistically richer, moving beyond whole shape descriptions to include segmentation maps and part labels. We use this resource to evaluate the abstract visual reasoning capacities of recent multi-modal models. We observe that pre-trained weights demonstrate limited abstract reasoning, which dramatically improves with fine-tuning. We also observe that explicitly describing parts aids abstract reasoning for both humans and models, especially when jointly encoding the linguistic and visual inputs. KiloGram is available at https://lil.nlp.cornell.edu/kilogram .

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated proficiency in handling a variety of visual-language tasks. However, current MLLM benchmarks are predominantly designed to evaluate reasoning based on static information about a single image, and the ability of modern MLLMs to extrapolate from image sequences, which is essential for understanding our ever-changing world, has been less investigated. To address this challenge, this paper introduces Mementos, a new benchmark designed to assess MLLMs' sequential image reasoning abilities. Mementos features 4,761 diverse image sequences with varying lengths. We also employ a GPT-4 assisted method to evaluate MLLM reasoning performance. Through a careful evaluation of nine recent MLLMs on Mementos, including GPT-4V and Gemini, we find that they struggle to accurately describe dynamic information about given image sequences, often leading to hallucinations/misrepresentations of objects and their corresponding behaviors. Our quantitative analysis and case studies identify three key factors impacting MLLMs' sequential image reasoning: the correlation between object and behavioral hallucinations, the influence of cooccurring behaviors, and the compounding impact of behavioral hallucinations. Our dataset is available at https://github.com/umd-huang-lab/Mementos.

Reinforcement learning agents often forget details of the past, especially after delays or distractor tasks. Agents with common memory architectures struggle to recall and integrate across multiple timesteps of a past event, or even to recall the details of a single timestep that is followed by distractor tasks. To address these limitations, we propose a Hierarchical Chunk Attention Memory (HCAM), which helps agents to remember the past in detail. HCAM stores memories by dividing the past into chunks, and recalls by first performing high-level attention over coarse summaries of the chunks, and then performing detailed attention within only the most relevant chunks. An agent with HCAM can therefore "mentally time-travel" -- remember past events in detail without attending to all intervening events. We show that agents with HCAM substantially outperform agents with other memory architectures at tasks requiring long-term recall, retention, or reasoning over memory. These include recalling where an object is hidden in a 3D environment, rapidly learning to navigate efficiently in a new neighborhood, and rapidly learning and retaining new object names. Agents with HCAM can extrapolate to task sequences much longer than they were trained on, and can even generalize zero-shot from a meta-learning setting to maintaining knowledge across episodes. HCAM improves agent sample efficiency, generalization, and generality (by solving tasks that previously required specialized architectures). Our work is a step towards agents that can learn, interact, and adapt in complex and temporally-extended environments.

Understanding how the human brain represents visual concepts, and in which brain regions these representations are encoded, remains a long-standing challenge. Decades of work have advanced our understanding of visual representations, yet brain signals remain large and complex, and the space of possible visual concepts is vast. As a result, most studies remain small-scale, rely on manual inspection, focus on specific regions and properties, and rarely include systematic validation. We present a large-scale, automated framework for discovering and explaining visual representations across the human cortex. Our method comprises two main stages. First, we discover candidate interpretable patterns in fMRI activity through unsupervised, data-driven decomposition methods. Next, we explain each pattern by identifying the set of natural images that most strongly elicit it and generating a natural-language description of their shared visual meaning. To scale this process, we introduce an automated pipeline that tests multiple candidate explanations, assigns quantitative reliability scores, and selects the most consistent description for each voxel pattern. Our framework reveals thousands of interpretable patterns spanning many distinct visual concepts, including fine-grained representations previously unreported.

The "thinking with images" paradigm represents a pivotal shift in the reasoning of Vision Language Models (VLMs), moving from text-dominant chain-of-thought to image-interactive reasoning. By invoking visual tools or generating intermediate visual representations, VLMs can iteratively attend to fine-grained regions, enabling deeper image understanding and more faithful multimodal reasoning. As an emerging paradigm, however, it still leaves substantial room for exploration in data construction accuracy, structural design, and broader application scenarios, which offer rich opportunities for advancing multimodal reasoning. To further advance this line of work, we present DeepSketcher, a comprehensive suite comprising both an image-text interleaved dataset and a self-contained model. The dataset contains 31k chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning trajectories with diverse tool calls and resulting edited images, covering a wide range of data types and manipulation instructions with high annotation accuracy. Building on this resource, we design a model that performs interleaved image-text reasoning and natively generates "visual thoughts" by operating directly in the visual embedding space, rather than invoking external tools and repeatedly re-encoding generated images. This design enables tool-free and more flexible "thinking with images". Extensive experiments on multimodal reasoning benchmarks demonstrate strong performance, validating both the utility of the dataset and the effectiveness of the model design.

Large language models are known to suffer from the hallucination problem in that they are prone to output statements that are false or inconsistent, indicating a lack of knowledge. A proposed solution to this is to provide the model with additional data modalities that complements the knowledge obtained through text. We investigate the use of visual data to complement the knowledge of large language models by proposing a method for evaluating visual knowledge transfer to text for uni- or multimodal language models. The method is based on two steps, 1) a novel task querying for knowledge of memory colors, i.e. typical colors of well-known objects, and 2) filtering of model training data to clearly separate knowledge contributions. Additionally, we introduce a model architecture that involves a visual imagination step and evaluate it with our proposed method. We find that our method can successfully be used to measure visual knowledge transfer capabilities in models and that our novel model architecture shows promising results for leveraging multimodal knowledge in a unimodal setting.

Learning object-centric representations of complex scenes is a promising step towards enabling efficient abstract reasoning from low-level perceptual features. Yet, most deep learning approaches learn distributed representations that do not capture the compositional properties of natural scenes. In this paper, we present the Slot Attention module, an architectural component that interfaces with perceptual representations such as the output of a convolutional neural network and produces a set of task-dependent abstract representations which we call slots. These slots are exchangeable and can bind to any object in the input by specializing through a competitive procedure over multiple rounds of attention. We empirically demonstrate that Slot Attention can extract object-centric representations that enable generalization to unseen compositions when trained on unsupervised object discovery and supervised property prediction tasks.

Memory-based neural networks model temporal data by leveraging an ability to remember information for long periods. It is unclear, however, whether they also have an ability to perform complex relational reasoning with the information they remember. Here, we first confirm our intuitions that standard memory architectures may struggle at tasks that heavily involve an understanding of the ways in which entities are connected -- i.e., tasks involving relational reasoning. We then improve upon these deficits by using a new memory module -- a Relational Memory Core (RMC) -- which employs multi-head dot product attention to allow memories to interact. Finally, we test the RMC on a suite of tasks that may profit from more capable relational reasoning across sequential information, and show large gains in RL domains (e.g. Mini PacMan), program evaluation, and language modeling, achieving state-of-the-art results on the WikiText-103, Project Gutenberg, and GigaWord datasets.

In large multimodal models (LMMs), the perception of non-language modalities (e.g., visual representations) is usually not on par with the large language models (LLMs)' powerful reasoning capabilities, deterring LMMs' performance on challenging downstream tasks. This weakness has been recently mitigated by replacing the vision encoder with a mixture-of-experts (MoE), which provides rich, multi-granularity, and diverse representations required by diverse downstream tasks. The performance of multimodal MoE largely depends on its router, which reweights and mixes the representations of different experts for each input. However, we find that the end-to-end trained router does not always produce the optimal routing weights for every test sample. To bridge the gap, we propose a novel and efficient method "Re-Routing in Test-Time(R2-T2) that locally optimizes the vector of routing weights in test-time by moving it toward those vectors of the correctly predicted samples in a neighborhood of the test sample. We propose three R2-T2 strategies with different optimization objectives and neighbor-search spaces. R2-T2 consistently and greatly improves state-of-the-art LMMs' performance on challenging benchmarks of diverse tasks, without training any base-model parameters.

"Thinking with Text" and "Thinking with Images" paradigm significantly improve the reasoning ability of large language models (LLMs) and Vision Language Models (VLMs). However, these paradigms have inherent limitations. (1) Images capture only single moments and fail to represent dynamic processes or continuous changes, and (2) The separation of text and vision as distinct modalities, hindering unified multimodal understanding and generation. To overcome these limitations, we introduce "Thinking with Video", a new paradigm that leverages video generation models, such as Sora-2, to bridge visual and textual reasoning in a unified temporal framework. To support this exploration, we developed the Video Thinking Benchmark (VideoThinkBench). VideoThinkBench encompasses two task categories: (1) vision-centric tasks (e.g., Eyeballing Puzzles), and (2) text-centric tasks (e.g., subsets of GSM8K, MMMU). Our evaluation establishes Sora-2 as a capable reasoner. On vision-centric tasks, Sora-2 is generally comparable to state-of-the-art (SOTA) VLMs, and even surpasses VLMs on several tasks, such as Eyeballing Games. On text-centric tasks, Sora-2 achieves 92% accuracy on MATH, and 75.53% accuracy on MMMU. Furthermore, we systematically analyse the source of these abilities. We also find that self-consistency and in-context learning can improve Sora-2's performance. In summary, our findings demonstrate that the video generation model is the potential unified multimodal understanding and generation model, positions "thinking with video" as a unified multimodal reasoning paradigm.

In the study of LLMs, sycophancy represents a prevalent hallucination that poses significant challenges to these models. Specifically, LLMs often fail to adhere to original correct responses, instead blindly agreeing with users' opinions, even when those opinions are incorrect or malicious. However, research on sycophancy in visual language models (VLMs) has been scarce. In this work, we extend the exploration of sycophancy from LLMs to VLMs, introducing the MM-SY benchmark to evaluate this phenomenon. We present evaluation results from multiple representative models, addressing the gap in sycophancy research for VLMs. To mitigate sycophancy, we propose a synthetic dataset for training and employ methods based on prompts, supervised fine-tuning, and DPO. Our experiments demonstrate that these methods effectively alleviate sycophancy in VLMs. Additionally, we probe VLMs to assess the semantic impact of sycophancy and analyze the attention distribution of visual tokens. Our findings indicate that the ability to prevent sycophancy is predominantly observed in higher layers of the model. The lack of attention to image knowledge in these higher layers may contribute to sycophancy, and enhancing image attention at high layers proves beneficial in mitigating this issue.

Vision-and-Language Navigation requires an embodied agent to navigate through unseen environments, guided by natural language instructions and a continuous video stream. Recent advances in VLN have been driven by the powerful semantic understanding of Multimodal Large Language Models. However, these methods typically rely on explicit semantic memory, such as building textual cognitive maps or storing historical visual frames. This type of method suffers from spatial information loss, computational redundancy, and memory bloat, which impede efficient navigation. Inspired by the implicit scene representation in human navigation, analogous to the left brain's semantic understanding and the right brain's spatial cognition, we propose JanusVLN, a novel VLN framework featuring a dual implicit neural memory that models spatial-geometric and visual-semantic memory as separate, compact, and fixed-size neural representations. This framework first extends the MLLM to incorporate 3D prior knowledge from the spatial-geometric encoder, thereby enhancing the spatial reasoning capabilities of models based solely on RGB input. Then, the historical key-value caches from the spatial-geometric and visual-semantic encoders are constructed into a dual implicit memory. By retaining only the KVs of tokens in the initial and sliding window, redundant computation is avoided, enabling efficient incremental updates. Extensive experiments demonstrate that JanusVLN outperforms over 20 recent methods to achieve SOTA performance. For example, the success rate improves by 10.5-35.5 compared to methods using multiple data types as input and by 3.6-10.8 compared to methods using more RGB training data. This indicates that the proposed dual implicit neural memory, as a novel paradigm, explores promising new directions for future VLN research. Ours project page: https://miv-xjtu.github.io/JanusVLN.github.io/.

Recently, Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated significant potential in complex visual tasks through the integration of Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning. However, in Video Question Answering, extended thinking processes do not consistently yield performance gains and may even lead to degradation due to ``visual anchor drifting'', where models increasingly rely on self-generated text, sidelining visual inputs and causing hallucinations. While existing mitigations typically introduce specific mechanisms for the model to re-attend to visual inputs during inference, these approaches often incur prohibitive training costs and suffer from poor generalizability across different architectures. To address this, we propose FrameRepeat, an automated enhancement framework which features a lightweight repeat scoring module that enables Video-LLMs to autonomously identify which frames should be reinforced. We introduce a novel training strategy, Add-One-In (AOI), that uses MLLM output probabilities to generate supervision signals representing repeat gain. This can be used to train a frame scoring network, which guides the frame repetition behavior. Experimental results across multiple models and datasets demonstrate that FrameRepeat is both effective and generalizable in strengthening important visual cues during the reasoning process.

Video world models have shown immense potential in simulating the physical world, yet existing memory mechanisms primarily treat environments as static canvases. When dynamic subjects hide out of sight and later re-emerge, current methods often struggle, leading to frozen, distorted, or vanishing subjects. To address this, we introduce Hybrid Memory, a novel paradigm requiring models to simultaneously act as precise archivists for static backgrounds and vigilant trackers for dynamic subjects, ensuring motion continuity during out-of-view intervals. To facilitate research in this direction, we construct HM-World, the first large-scale video dataset dedicated to hybrid memory. It features 59K high-fidelity clips with decoupled camera and subject trajectories, encompassing 17 diverse scenes, 49 distinct subjects, and meticulously designed exit-entry events to rigorously evaluate hybrid coherence. Furthermore, we propose HyDRA, a specialized memory architecture that compresses memory into tokens and utilizes a spatiotemporal relevance-driven retrieval mechanism. By selectively attending to relevant motion cues, HyDRA effectively preserves the identity and motion of hidden subjects. Extensive experiments on HM-World demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in both dynamic subject consistency and overall generation quality.

The dynamic nature of information necessitates continuously updating large vision-language models (LVLMs). While recent knowledge editing techniques hint at promising directions, they often focus on editing a single modality (vision or language) in isolation. This prevalent practice neglects the inherent multimodality of LVLMs and the continuous nature of knowledge updates, potentially leading to suboptimal editing outcomes when considering the interplay between modalities and the need for ongoing knowledge refinement. To address these limitations, we propose MemEIC, a novel method for Continual and Compositional Knowledge Editing (CCKE) in LVLMs. MemEIC enables compositional editing of both visual and textual knowledge sequentially. Our approach employs a hybrid external-internal editor featuring a dual external memory for cross-modal evidence retrieval and dual LoRA adapters that facilitate disentangled parameter updates for each modality. A key component is a brain-inspired knowledge connector, activated selectively for compositional reasoning, that integrates information across different modalities. Experiments demonstrate that MemEIC significantly improves performance on complex multimodal questions and effectively preserves prior edits, setting a new benchmark for CCKE in LVLMs.

While datasets for video understanding have scaled to hour-long durations, they typically consist of densely concatenated clips that differ from natural, unscripted daily life. To bridge this gap, we introduce MM-Lifelong, a dataset designed for Multimodal Lifelong Understanding. Comprising 181.1 hours of footage, it is structured across Day, Week, and Month scales to capture varying temporal densities. Extensive evaluations reveal two critical failure modes in current paradigms: end-to-end MLLMs suffer from a Working Memory Bottleneck due to context saturation, while representative agentic baselines experience Global Localization Collapse when navigating sparse, month-long timelines. To address this, we propose the Recursive Multimodal Agent (ReMA), which employs dynamic memory management to iteratively update a recursive belief state, significantly outperforming existing methods. Finally, we establish dataset splits designed to isolate temporal and domain biases, providing a rigorous foundation for future research in supervised learning and out-of-distribution generalization.