Daily Papers

Large Language Model agents have rapidly evolved from static text generators into dynamic systems capable of executing complex autonomous workflows. To enhance reliability, multi-agent frameworks assigning specialized roles are increasingly adopted to enable self-reflection and mutual auditing. While such role-playing effectively leverages domain expert knowledge, we find it simultaneously induces a human-like cognitive bias known as Actor-Observer Asymmetry (AOA). Specifically, an agent acting as an actor (during self-reflection) tends to attribute failures to external factors, whereas an observer (during mutual auditing) attributes the same errors to internal faults. We quantify this using our new Ambiguous Failure Benchmark, which reveals that simply swapping perspectives triggers the AOA effect in over 20% of cases for most models. To tame this bias, we introduce ReTAS (Reasoning via Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis), a model trained through dialectical alignment to enforce perspective-invariant reasoning. By integrating dialectical chain-of-thought with Group Relative Policy Optimization, ReTAS guides agents to synthesize conflicting viewpoints into an objective consensus. Experiments demonstrate that ReTAS effectively mitigates attribution inconsistency and significantly improves fault resolution rates in ambiguous scenarios.

Standard Transformers have a fixed computational depth, fundamentally limiting their ability to generalize to tasks requiring variable-depth reasoning, such as multi-hop graph traversal or nested logic. We propose a depth-recurrent Transformer that decouples computational depth from parameter count by iteratively applying a shared-weight Transformer block in latent space -- enabling the model to trade recurrence steps for deeper reasoning at inference time. Our architecture incorporates three mechanisms to make deep recurrence (20+ steps) stable: (1) a silent thinking objective that supervises only the final output, forcing genuine multi-step reasoning rather than intermediate heuristic shortcuts; (2) LayerScale initialization to protect fragile reasoning states from untrained layer noise; and (3) an identity-biased recurrence that creates a gradient highway across many steps. We evaluate on three compositional reasoning domains with decreasing inductive biases: graph reachability (strict adjacency masking), nested boolean logic (relative positioning), and unstructured relational text (where sequence position provides no structural hints). Across all tasks, we observe a clear computational frontier -- a boundary where performance transitions from chance to near-perfect as thinking steps scale with task complexity. Moreover, these tasks reveal qualitatively different generalization behaviors: precise but brittle (graph), approximate but robust (logic), and autonomous latent routing without structural hints (text). This progression illuminates how the interplay between a task-invariant recurrent reasoning core and task-specific perceptual interfaces shapes out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization, offering a mechanistic perspective on vertical chain-of-thought that complements the prevailing horizontal token-generation paradigm.

We present a framework for perspective-aware reasoning in vision-language models (VLMs) through mental imagery simulation. Perspective-taking, the ability to perceive an environment or situation from an alternative viewpoint, is a key benchmark for human-level visual understanding, essential for environmental interaction and collaboration with autonomous agents. Despite advancements in spatial reasoning within VLMs, recent research has shown that modern VLMs significantly lack perspective-aware reasoning capabilities and exhibit a strong bias toward egocentric interpretations. To bridge the gap between VLMs and human perception, we focus on the role of mental imagery, where humans perceive the world through abstracted representations that facilitate perspective shifts. Motivated by this, we propose a framework for perspective-aware reasoning, named Abstract Perspective Change (APC), that effectively leverages vision foundation models, such as object detection, segmentation, and orientation estimation, to construct scene abstractions and enable perspective transformations. Our experiments on synthetic and real-image benchmarks, compared with various VLMs, demonstrate significant improvements in perspective-aware reasoning with our framework, further outperforming fine-tuned spatial reasoning models and novel-view-synthesis-based approaches.

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.

Visual reasoning models (VRMs) have recently shown strong cross-modal reasoning capabilities by integrating visual perception with language reasoning. However, they often suffer from overthinking, producing unnecessarily long reasoning chains for any tasks. We attribute this issue to Reasoning Path Redundancy in visual reasoning: many visual questions do not require the full reasoning process. To address this, we propose AVR, an adaptive visual reasoning framework that decomposes visual reasoning into three cognitive functions: visual perception, logical reasoning, and answer application. It further enables models to dynamically choose among three response formats: Full Format, Perception-Only Format, and Direct Answer. AVR is trained with FS-GRPO, an adaptation of Group Relative Policy Optimization that encourages the model to select the most efficient reasoning format while preserving correctness. Experiments on multiple vision-language benchmarks show that AVR reduces token usage by 50--90\% while maintaining overall accuracy, especially in perception-intensive tasks. These results demonstrate that adaptive visual reasoning can effectively mitigate overthinking in VRMs. Code and data are available at: https://github.com/RunRiotComeOn/AVR.

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.

Spatial reasoning, the ability to ground language in 3D understanding, remains a persistent challenge for Vision-Language Models (VLMs). We identify two fundamental bottlenecks: inadequate 3D understanding capabilities stemming from 2D-centric pre-training, and reasoning failures induced by redundant 3D information. To address these, we first construct a Minimal Sufficient Set (MSS) of information before answering a given question: a compact selection of 3D perception results from expert models. We introduce MSSR (Minimal Sufficient Spatial Reasoner), a dual-agent framework that implements this principle. A Perception Agent programmatically queries 3D scenes using a versatile perception toolbox to extract sufficient information, including a novel SOG (Situated Orientation Grounding) module that robustly extracts language-grounded directions. A Reasoning Agent then iteratively refines this information to pursue minimality, pruning redundant details and requesting missing ones in a closed loop until the MSS is curated. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method, by explicitly pursuing both sufficiency and minimality, significantly improves accuracy and achieves state-of-the-art performance across two challenging benchmarks. Furthermore, our framework produces interpretable reasoning paths, offering a promising source of high-quality training data for future models. Source code is available at https://github.com/gyj155/mssr.

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has achieved remarkable success in unlocking the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). Although CoT prompting enhances reasoning, its verbosity imposes substantial computational overhead. Recent works often focus exclusively on outcome alignment and lack supervision on the intermediate reasoning process. These deficiencies obscure the analyzability of the latent reasoning chain. To address these challenges, we introduce Render-of-Thought (RoT), the first framework to reify the reasoning chain by rendering textual steps into images, making the latent rationale explicit and traceable. Specifically, we leverage the vision encoders of existing Vision Language Models (VLMs) as semantic anchors to align the vision embeddings with the textual space. This design ensures plug-and-play implementation without incurring additional pre-training overhead. Extensive experiments on mathematical and logical reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves 3-4x token compression and substantial inference acceleration compared to explicit CoT. Furthermore, it maintains competitive performance against other methods, validating the feasibility of this paradigm. Our code is available at https://github.com/TencentBAC/RoT

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.

Recent reinforcement-learning frameworks for visual perception policy have begun to incorporate intermediate reasoning chains expressed in natural language. Empirical observations indicate that such purely linguistic intermediate reasoning often reduces performance on perception tasks. We argue that the core issue lies not in reasoning per se but in the form of reasoning: while these chains perform semantic reasoning in an unstructured linguistic space, visual perception requires reasoning in a spatial and object-centric space. In response, we introduce Artemis, a perception-policy learning framework that performs structured proposal-based reasoning, where each intermediate step is represented as a (label, bounding-box) pair capturing a verifiable visual state. This design enables explicit tracking of intermediate states, direct supervision for proposal quality, and avoids ambiguity introduced by language-based reasoning. Artemis is built on Qwen2.5-VL-3B, achieves strong performance on grounding and detection task and exhibits substantial generalization to counting and geometric-perception tasks. The consistent improvements across these diverse settings confirm that aligning reasoning with spatial representations enhances perception-policy learning. Owing to its strengthened visual reasoning, Artemis also achieves competitive performance on general MLLM benchmarks, illustrating that spatially grounded reasoning provides a principled route toward scalable and general perception policies.

Recent advances in vision-language reasoning underscore the importance of thinking with images, where models actively ground their reasoning in visual evidence. Yet, prevailing frameworks treat visual actions as optional tools, boosting metrics but leaving reasoning ungrounded and crops ineffective. This gap gives rise to the illusion of thinking with images: models seem visually grounded but rely on context-agnostic actions that neither refine perception nor guide reasoning toward correct answers. We address this problem by reframing visual actions as core reasoning primitives rather than optional tools, which we term visual rationalization, the visual analogue of textual Chain-of-Thought. Building on this insight, we propose Visual Rationale Learning (ViRL), an end-to-end paradigm that grounds training in the visual rationale itself. ViRL integrates (1) Process Supervision with ground-truth rationales, (2) Objective Alignment via step-level reward shaping, and (3) Fine-Grained Credit Assignment to distinguish correct, redundant, and erroneous actions. By ensuring each action contributes meaningfully to the reasoning chain, ViRL enables models to "get the right answer for the right visual reason". Trained purely with end-to-end RL, ViRL achieves state-of-the-art results across benchmarks spanning perception, hallucination, and reasoning. This work establishes visual rationalization as a task-agnostic, process-grounded paradigm for building transparent, verifiable, and trustworthy vision-language models.

Visual reasoning is critical for a wide range of computer vision tasks that go beyond surface-level object detection and classification. Despite notable advances in relational, symbolic, temporal, causal, and commonsense reasoning, existing surveys often address these directions in isolation, lacking a unified analysis and comparison across reasoning types, methodologies, and evaluation protocols. This survey aims to address this gap by categorizing visual reasoning into five major types (relational, symbolic, temporal, causal, and commonsense) and systematically examining their implementation through architectures such as graph-based models, memory networks, attention mechanisms, and neuro-symbolic systems. We review evaluation protocols designed to assess functional correctness, structural consistency, and causal validity, and critically analyze their limitations in terms of generalizability, reproducibility, and explanatory power. Beyond evaluation, we identify key open challenges in visual reasoning, including scalability to complex scenes, deeper integration of symbolic and neural paradigms, the lack of comprehensive benchmark datasets, and reasoning under weak supervision. Finally, we outline a forward-looking research agenda for next-generation vision systems, emphasizing that bridging perception and reasoning is essential for building transparent, trustworthy, and cross-domain adaptive AI systems, particularly in critical domains such as autonomous driving and medical diagnostics.

Dramatic progress has been witnessed in basic vision tasks involving low-level perception, such as object recognition, detection, and tracking. Unfortunately, there is still an enormous performance gap between artificial vision systems and human intelligence in terms of higher-level vision problems, especially ones involving reasoning. Earlier attempts in equipping machines with high-level reasoning have hovered around Visual Question Answering (VQA), one typical task associating vision and language understanding. In this work, we propose a new dataset, built in the context of Raven's Progressive Matrices (RPM) and aimed at lifting machine intelligence by associating vision with structural, relational, and analogical reasoning in a hierarchical representation. Unlike previous works in measuring abstract reasoning using RPM, we establish a semantic link between vision and reasoning by providing structure representation. This addition enables a new type of abstract reasoning by jointly operating on the structure representation. Machine reasoning ability using modern computer vision is evaluated in this newly proposed dataset. Additionally, we also provide human performance as a reference. Finally, we show consistent improvement across all models by incorporating a simple neural module that combines visual understanding and structure reasoning.

Recent advances in large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have exhibited strong reasoning capabilities on complex visual tasks by thinking with images in their Chain-of-Thought (CoT), which is achieved by actively invoking tools to analyze visual inputs rather than merely perceiving them. However, existing models often struggle to reflect on and correct themselves when attempting incorrect reasoning trajectories. To address this limitation, we propose DRIM, a model that enables deep but reliable multi-turn reasoning when thinking with images in its multimodal CoT. Our pipeline comprises three stages: data construction, cold-start SFT and RL. Based on a high-resolution image dataset, we construct high-difficulty and verifiable visual question-answer pairs, where solving each task requires multi-turn tool calls to reach the correct answer. In the SFT stage, we collect tool trajectories as cold-start data, guiding a multi-turn reasoning pattern. In the RL stage, we introduce redundancy-penalized policy optimization, which incentivizes the model to develop a self-reflective reasoning pattern. The basic idea is to impose judgment on reasoning trajectories and penalize those that produce incorrect answers without sufficient multi-scale exploration. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DRIM achieves superior performance on visual understanding benchmarks.

Multi-view visual reasoning is essential for intelligent systems that must understand complex environments from sparse and discrete viewpoints, yet existing research has largely focused on single-image or temporally dense video settings. In real-world scenarios, reasoning across views requires integrating partial observations without explicit guidance, while collecting large-scale multi-view data with accurate geometric and semantic annotations remains challenging. To address this gap, we leverage physically grounded simulation to construct diverse, high-fidelity 3D scenes with precise per-view metadata, enabling scalable data generation that remains transferable to real-world settings. Based on this engine, we introduce VIEW2SPACE, a multi-dimensional benchmark for sparse multi-view reasoning, together with a scalable, disjoint training split supporting millions of grounded question-answer pairs. Using this benchmark, a comprehensive evaluation of state-of-the-art vision-language and spatial models reveals that multi-view reasoning remains largely unsolved, with most models performing only marginally above random guessing. We further investigate whether training can bridge this gap. Our proposed Grounded Chain-of-Thought with Visual Evidence substantially improves performance under moderate difficulty, and generalizes to real-world data, outperforming existing approaches in cross-dataset evaluation. We further conduct difficulty-aware scaling analyses across model size, data scale, reasoning depth, and visibility constraints, indicating that while geometric perception can benefit from scaling under sufficient visibility, deep compositional reasoning across sparse views remains a fundamental challenge.

Existing multimodal large language models have achieved high-fidelity visual perception and exploratory visual generation. However, a precision paradox persists in complex reasoning tasks: optical perception systems transcribe symbols without capturing logical topology, while pixel-based generative models produce visual artifacts lacking mathematical exactness. To bridge this gap, we propose that reasoning over visual inputs be reconceptualized as optical decompression-the process of reconstructing latent logical structures from compressed visual tokens. Guided by the axiom that Parsing is Reasoning, we introduce Thinking with Drafting (TwD), which utilizes a minimalist Domain-Specific Language (DSL) as a grounding intermediate representation. Unlike standard approaches that hallucinate answers directly, TwD forces the model to draft its mental model into executable code, rendering deterministic visual proofs for self-verification. To validate this, we present VisAlg, a visual algebra benchmark. Experiments demonstrate that TwD serve as a superior cognitive scaffold. Our work establishes a closed-loop system where visual generation acts not as a creative output but as a logical verifier, offering a generalizable path for visual reasoning.

Spatial reasoning is a core aspect of human intelligence that allows perception, inference and planning in 3D environments. However, current vision-language models (VLMs) struggle to maintain geometric coherence and cross-view consistency for spatial reasoning in multi-view settings. We attribute this gap to the lack of fine-grained benchmarks that isolate multi-view reasoning from single-view perception and temporal factors. To address this, we present ReMindView-Bench, a cognitively grounded benchmark for evaluating how VLMs construct, align and maintain spatial mental models across complementary viewpoints. ReMindView-Bench systematically varies viewpoint spatial pattern and query type to probe key factors of spatial cognition. Evaluations of 15 current VLMs reveals consistent failures in cross-view alignment and perspective-taking in multi-view spatial reasoning, motivating deeper analysis on the reasoning process. Explicit phase-wise analysis using LLM-as-a-judge and self-consistency prompting shows that VLMs perform well on in-frame perception but degrade sharply when integrating information across views. Implicit analysis, including linear probing and entropy dynamics, further show progressive loss of task-relevant information and uncertainty separation between correct and incorrect trajectories. These results provide a cognitively grounded diagnosis of VLM spatial reasoning and reveal how multi-view spatial mental models are formed, degraded and destabilized across reasoning phases. The ReMindView-Bench benchmark is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/Xue0823/ReMindView-Bench, and the source codes of benchmark construction and VLM reasoning analysis are available at https://github.com/pittisl/ReMindView-Bench.

It is a common practice for recent works in vision language cross-modal reasoning to adopt a binary or multi-choice classification formulation taking as input a set of source image(s) and textual query. In this work, we take a sober look at such an unconditional formulation in the sense that no prior knowledge is specified with respect to the source image(s). Inspired by the designs of both visual commonsense reasoning and natural language inference tasks, we propose a new task termed Premise-based Multi-modal Reasoning(PMR) where a textual premise is the background presumption on each source image. The PMR dataset contains 15,360 manually annotated samples which are created by a multi-phase crowd-sourcing process. With selected high-quality movie screenshots and human-curated premise templates from 6 pre-defined categories, we ask crowd-source workers to write one true hypothesis and three distractors (4 choices) given the premise and image through a cross-check procedure. Besides, we generate adversarial samples to alleviate the annotation artifacts and double the size of PMR. We benchmark various state-of-the-art (pretrained) multi-modal inference models on PMR and conduct comprehensive experimental analyses to showcase the utility of our dataset.

Visual reasoning in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) has primarily been studied in static, fully observable settings, limiting their effectiveness in real-world environments where information is often incomplete due to occlusion or limited field of view. Humans, in contrast, actively explore and interact with their environment-moving, examining, and manipulating objects-to gather information through a closed-loop process integrating perception, reasoning, and action. Inspired by this human capability, we introduce the Active Visual Reasoning (AVR) task, extending visual reasoning to partially observable, interactive environments. AVR necessitates agents to: (1) actively acquire information via sequential physical actions, (2) integrate observations across multiple steps for coherent reasoning, and (3) dynamically adjust decisions based on evolving visual feedback. To rigorously evaluate AVR, we introduce CLEVR-AVR, a simulation benchmark featuring multi-round interactive environments designed to assess both reasoning correctness and information-gathering efficiency. We present AVR-152k, a large-scale dataset that offers rich Chain-of-Thought (CoT) annotations detailing iterative reasoning for uncertainty identification, action-conditioned information gain prediction, and information-maximizing action selection, crucial for training agents in a higher-order Markov Decision Process. Building on this, we develop PhysVLM-AVR, an MLLM achieving state-of-the-art performance on CLEVR-AVR, embodied reasoning (OpenEQA, RoboVQA), and passive visual reasoning (GeoMath, Geometry30K). Our analysis also reveals that current embodied MLLMs, despite detecting information incompleteness, struggle to actively acquire and integrate new information through interaction, highlighting a fundamental gap in active reasoning capabilities.

Significant advancements in the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) are now driven by test-time scaling laws, particularly those leveraging extended Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning. Inspired by these breakthroughs, researchers have extended these paradigms to Large Multimodal Models (LMMs). However, a critical limitation emerges: as their reasoning chains extend, LMMs increasingly rely on textual logic, progressively losing grounding in the underlying visual information. This leads to reasoning paths that diverge from the image content, culminating in erroneous conclusions. To address this, we introduce a strikingly simple yet effective training-free visual-reasoning pipeline. The core concept is to decouple the reasoning and perception processes. A powerful LLM orchestrates the high-level reasoning, strategically interrogating a LMM to extract specific visual information required for its logical chain. The LMM, in turn, functions exclusively as a visual question-answering engine, supplying the necessary perceptual details on demand. This lightweight, plug-and-play approach requires no additional training or architectural changes. Comprehensive evaluations validate that our framework effectively governs the visual reasoning process, leading to a significant reduction in visually-unfounded reasoning steps and a substantial improvement in reasoning fidelity.

Humans are able to accurately reason in 3D by gathering multi-view observations of the surrounding world. Inspired by this insight, we introduce a new large-scale benchmark for 3D multi-view visual question answering (3DMV-VQA). This dataset is collected by an embodied agent actively moving and capturing RGB images in an environment using the Habitat simulator. In total, it consists of approximately 5k scenes, 600k images, paired with 50k questions. We evaluate various state-of-the-art models for visual reasoning on our benchmark and find that they all perform poorly. We suggest that a principled approach for 3D reasoning from multi-view images should be to infer a compact 3D representation of the world from the multi-view images, which is further grounded on open-vocabulary semantic concepts, and then to execute reasoning on these 3D representations. As the first step towards this approach, we propose a novel 3D concept learning and reasoning (3D-CLR) framework that seamlessly combines these components via neural fields, 2D pre-trained vision-language models, and neural reasoning operators. Experimental results suggest that our framework outperforms baseline models by a large margin, but the challenge remains largely unsolved. We further perform an in-depth analysis of the challenges and highlight potential future directions.

Recent breakthroughs in reasoning models have markedly advanced the reasoning capabilities of large language models, particularly via training on tasks with verifiable rewards. Yet, a significant gap persists in their adaptation to real world multimodal scenarios, most notably, vision language tasks, due to a heavy focus on single modal language settings. While efforts to transplant reinforcement learning techniques from NLP to VLMs have emerged, these approaches often remain confined to perception centric tasks or reduce images to textual summaries, failing to fully exploit visual context and commonsense knowledge, ultimately constraining the generalization of reasoning capabilities across diverse multimodal environments. To address this limitation, we introduce a novel fine tuning task, Masked Prediction via Context and Commonsense, which forces models to integrate visual context and commonsense reasoning by reconstructing semantically meaningful content from occluded images, thereby laying the foundation for generalized reasoning. To systematically evaluate the model performance in generalized reasoning, we developed a specialized evaluation benchmark, MPCC Eval, and employed various fine tuning strategies to guide reasoning. Among these, we introduced an innovative training method, Reinforcement Fine tuning with Prior Sampling, which not only enhances model performance but also improves its generalized reasoning capabilities in OOD and cross task scenarios.

Recent advances in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have significantly improved 2D visual understanding, prompting interest in their application to complex 3D reasoning tasks. However, it remains unclear whether these models can effectively capture the detailed spatial information required for robust real-world performance, especially cross-view consistency, a key requirement for accurate 3D reasoning. Considering this issue, we introduce Viewpoint Learning, a task designed to evaluate and improve the spatial reasoning capabilities of MLLMs. We present the Viewpoint-100K dataset, consisting of 100K object-centric image pairs with diverse viewpoints and corresponding question-answer pairs. Our approach employs a two-stage fine-tuning strategy: first, foundational knowledge is injected to the baseline MLLM via Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) on Viewpoint-100K, resulting in significant improvements across multiple tasks; second, generalization is enhanced through Reinforcement Learning using the Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) algorithm on a broader set of questions. Additionally, we introduce a hybrid cold-start initialization method designed to simultaneously learn viewpoint representations and maintain coherent reasoning thinking. Experimental results show that our approach significantly activates the spatial reasoning ability of MLLM, improving performance on both in-domain and out-of-domain reasoning tasks. Our findings highlight the value of developing foundational spatial skills in MLLMs, supporting future progress in robotics, autonomous systems, and 3D scene understanding.

Multi-image spatial reasoning remains challenging for current multimodal large language models (MLLMs). While single-view perception is inherently 2D, reasoning over multiple views requires building a coherent scene understanding across viewpoints. In particular, we study perspective taking, where a model must build a coherent 3D understanding from multi-view observations and use it to reason from a new, language-specified viewpoint. We introduce CAMCUE, a pose-aware multi-image framework that uses camera pose as an explicit geometric anchor for cross-view fusion and novel-view reasoning. CAMCUE injects per-view pose into visual tokens, grounds natural-language viewpoint descriptions to a target camera pose, and synthesizes a pose-conditioned imagined target view to support answering. To support this setting, we curate CAMCUE-DATA with 27,668 training and 508 test instances pairing multi-view images and poses with diverse target-viewpoint descriptions and perspective-shift questions. We also include human-annotated viewpoint descriptions in the test split to evaluate generalization to human language. CAMCUE improves overall accuracy by 9.06% and predicts target poses from natural-language viewpoint descriptions with over 90% rotation accuracy within 20° and translation accuracy within a 0.5 error threshold. This direct grounding avoids expensive test-time search-and-match, reducing inference time from 256.6s to 1.45s per example and enabling fast, interactive use in real-world scenarios.

This work explores enabling Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning to link visual cues across multiple images. A straightforward solution is to adapt rule-based reinforcement learning for Vision-Language Models (VLMs). However, such methods typically rely on manually curated question-answer pairs, which can be particularly challenging when dealing with fine grained visual details and complex logic across images. Inspired by self-supervised visual representation learning, we observe that images contain inherent constraints that can serve as supervision. Based on this insight, we construct image triplets comprising two augmented views of the same image and a third, similar but distinct image. During training, the model is prompted to generate a reasoning process to compare these images (i.e., determine same or different). Then we optimize the model with rule-based reinforcement learning. Due to the high visual similarity and the presence of augmentations, the model must attend to subtle visual changes and perform logical reasoning to succeed. Experiments show that, although trained solely on visual comparison tasks, the learned reasoning ability generalizes effectively to a wide range of questions. Without relying on any human-annotated question-answer pairs, our method achieves significant improvements on multi-image reasoning benchmarks and shows strong performance on general vision tasks.

Existing methods for visual reasoning attempt to directly map inputs to outputs using black-box architectures without explicitly modeling the underlying reasoning processes. As a result, these black-box models often learn to exploit biases in the data rather than learning to perform visual reasoning. Inspired by module networks, this paper proposes a model for visual reasoning that consists of a program generator that constructs an explicit representation of the reasoning process to be performed, and an execution engine that executes the resulting program to produce an answer. Both the program generator and the execution engine are implemented by neural networks, and are trained using a combination of backpropagation and REINFORCE. Using the CLEVR benchmark for visual reasoning, we show that our model significantly outperforms strong baselines and generalizes better in a variety of settings.

Despite recent advancements in Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) on diverse understanding tasks, these models struggle to solve problems which require extensive multi-step reasoning. This is primarily due to the progressive dilution of visual information during long-context generation, which hinders their ability to fully exploit test-time scaling. To address this issue, we introduce Vision-aligned Latent Reasoning (VaLR), a simple, yet effective reasoning framework that dynamically generates vision-aligned latent tokens before each Chain of Thought reasoning step, guiding the model to reason based on perceptual cues in the latent space. Specifically, VaLR is trained to preserve visual knowledge during reasoning by aligning intermediate embeddings of MLLM with those from vision encoders. Empirical results demonstrate that VaLR consistently outperforms existing approaches across a wide range of benchmarks requiring long-context understanding or precise visual perception, while exhibiting test-time scaling behavior not observed in prior MLLMs. In particular, VaLR improves the performance significantly from 33.0% to 52.9% on VSI-Bench, achieving a 19.9%p gain over Qwen2.5-VL.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have recently emerged as powerful tools, excelling in tasks that integrate visual and textual comprehension, such as image captioning, visual question answering, and image-text retrieval. However, existing benchmarks for VLMs include spatial components, which often fail to isolate spatial reasoning from related tasks such as object detection or semantic comprehension. In this paper, we address these deficiencies with a multi-faceted approach towards understanding spatial reasoning. Informed by the diverse and multi-dimensional nature of human spatial reasoning abilities, we present a detailed analysis that first delineates the core elements of spatial reasoning: spatial relations, orientation and navigation, mental rotation, and spatial visualization, and then assesses the performance of these models in both synthetic and real-world images, bridging controlled and naturalistic contexts. We analyze 13 state-of-the-art Vision-Language Models, uncovering pivotal insights into their spatial reasoning performance. Our results reveal profound shortcomings in current VLMs, with average accuracy across the 13 models approximating random chance, highlighting spatial reasoning as a persistent obstacle. This work not only exposes the pressing need to advance spatial reasoning within VLMs but also establishes a solid platform for future exploration. Code available on GitHub (https://github.com/stogiannidis/srbench) and dataset available on HuggingFace (https://huggingface.co/datasets/stogiannidis/srbench).

Large language models have shown impressive results for multi-hop mathematical reasoning when the input question is only textual. Many mathematical reasoning problems, however, contain both text and image. With the ever-increasing adoption of vision language models (VLMs), understanding their reasoning abilities for such problems is crucial. In this paper, we evaluate the reasoning capabilities of VLMs along various axes through the lens of geometry problems. We procedurally create a synthetic dataset of geometry questions with controllable difficulty levels along multiple axes, thus enabling a systematic evaluation. The empirical results obtained using our benchmark for state-of-the-art VLMs indicate that these models are not as capable in subjects like geometry (and, by generalization, other topics requiring similar reasoning) as suggested by previous benchmarks. This is made especially clear by the construction of our benchmark at various depth levels, since solving higher-depth problems requires long chains of reasoning rather than additional memorized knowledge. We release the dataset for further research in this area.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated their widespread viability thanks to extensive training in aligning visual instructions to answers. However, this conclusive alignment leads models to ignore critical visual reasoning, and further result in failures on meticulous visual problems and unfaithful responses. In this paper, we propose Chain of Manipulations, a mechanism that enables VLMs to solve problems with a series of manipulations, where each manipulation refers to an operation on the visual input, either from intrinsic abilities (e.g., grounding) acquired through prior training or from imitating human-like behaviors (e.g., zoom in). This mechanism encourages VLMs to generate faithful responses with evidential visual reasoning, and permits users to trace error causes in the interpretable paths. We thus train CogCoM, a general 17B VLM with a memory-based compatible architecture endowed this reasoning mechanism. Experiments show that our model achieves the state-of-the-art performance across 8 benchmarks from 3 categories, and a limited number of training steps with the data swiftly gains a competitive performance. The code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/THUDM/CogCoM.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have achieved remarkable progress in integrating visual perception with language understanding. However, effective multimodal reasoning requires both accurate perception and robust reasoning, and weakness in either limits the performance of VLMs. Prior efforts to enhance reasoning often depend on high-quality chain-of-thought (CoT) data, obtained via labor-intensive human annotations, costly proprietary models, or self-training methods that overlook perception. To address these limitations, we propose a simple yet effective self-training framework called See-Think-Learn (STL). At its core, STL introduces a structured reasoning template that encourages the model to see before thinking, first extracting visual attributes in textual form, then using them to guide reasoning. The framework jointly improves perception and reasoning by having the model generate and learn from its own structured rationales in a self-training loop. Furthermore, we augment the training data with negative rationales, i.e. explanations that justify why certain answer choices are incorrect, to enhance the model's ability to distinguish between correct and misleading responses. This fosters more discriminative and robust learning. Experiments across diverse domains show that STL consistently outperforms baselines trained directly only on answers or self-generated reasoning, while qualitative analysis confirms the high quality of its rationales. STL thus provides a cost-effective solution to enhance multimodal reasoning ability of VLMs.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) strive to achieve a profound, human-like understanding of and interaction with the physical world, but often exhibit a shallow and incoherent integration when acquiring information (Perception) and conducting reasoning (Cognition). This disconnect leads to a spectrum of reasoning failures, with hallucination being the most prominent. Collectively, these issues expose a fundamental challenge: the ability to process pixels does not yet confer the ability to construct a coherent, credible internal world model. To systematically dissect and address this challenge, this survey introduces a novel and unified analytical framework: ``From Perception to Cognition." We deconstruct the complex process of vision-language interactive understanding into two interdependent layers: Perception, the foundational ability to accurately extract visual information and achieve fine-grained alignment with textual instructions; and Cognition, the higher-order capability for proactive, multi-step, goal-oriented reasoning built upon this perceptual foundation, the core of which is the formation of a dynamic observe-think-verify reasoning loop. Guided by this framework, this paper systematically analyzes the key bottlenecks of current MLLMs at both layers. It surveys the landscape of cutting-edge methods designed to address these challenges, spanning from techniques that enhance low-level visual representations to those that improve high-level reasoning paradigms. Furthermore, we review critical benchmarks and delineate future research directions. This survey aims to provide the research community with a clear, structured perspective for understanding the intrinsic limitations of current MLLMs and to illuminate the path toward building next-generation models capable of deep reasoning and a genuine understanding of the world.

We present SpinBench, a cognitively grounded diagnostic benchmark for evaluating spatial reasoning in vision language models (VLMs). SpinBench is designed around the core challenge of spatial reasoning: perspective taking, the ability to reason about how scenes and object relations change under viewpoint transformation. Since perspective taking requires multiple cognitive capabilities, such as recognizing objects across views, relative positions grounding, and mentally simulating transformations, SpinBench introduces a set of fine-grained diagnostic categories. Our categories target translation, rotation, object relative pose, and viewpoint change, and are progressively structured so that single-object simpler tasks scaffold toward the most demanding multi-object perspective-taking setting. We evaluate 37 state-of-the-art VLMs, both proprietary and open source. Results reveal systematic weaknesses: strong egocentric bias, poor rotational understanding, and inconsistencies under symmetrical and syntactic reformulations. Scaling analysis shows both smooth improvements and emergent capabilities. While human subjects achieve high accuracy (91.2\%), task difficulty as measured by human response time shows strong correlation with VLM accuracy, indicating that SpinBench captures spatial reasoning challenges shared across humans and VLMs. We believe SpinBench provides critical insights into spatial reasoning in VLMs and highlights key gaps in their ability to reason about physical space. Our website can be found at https://spinbench25.github.io/.

Chart understanding presents a critical test to the reasoning capabilities of Vision-Language Models (VLMs). Prior approaches face critical limitations: some rely on external tools, making them brittle and constrained by a predefined toolkit, while others fine-tune specialist models that often adopt a single reasoning strategy, such as text-based chain-of-thought (CoT). The intermediate steps of text-based reasoning are difficult to verify, which complicates the use of reinforcement-learning signals that reward factual accuracy. To address this, we propose a Code-as-Thought (CaT) approach to represent the visual information of a chart in a verifiable, symbolic format. Our key insight is that this strategy must be adaptive: a fixed, code-only implementation consistently fails on complex charts where symbolic representation is unsuitable. This finding leads us to introduce Visual Programmability: a learnable property that determines if a chart-question pair is better solved with code or direct visual analysis. We implement this concept in an adaptive framework where a VLM learns to choose between the CaT pathway and a direct visual reasoning pathway. The selection policy of the model is trained with reinforcement learning using a novel dual-reward system. This system combines a data-accuracy reward to ground the model in facts and prevent numerical hallucination, with a decision reward that teaches the model when to use each strategy, preventing it from defaulting to a single reasoning mode. Experiments demonstrate strong and robust performance across diverse chart-understanding benchmarks. Our work shows that VLMs can be taught not only to reason but also how to reason, dynamically selecting the optimal reasoning pathway for each task.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are making significant progress in multimodal reasoning. Early approaches focus on pure text-based reasoning. More recent studies have incorporated multimodal information into the reasoning steps; however, they often follow a single task-specific reasoning pattern, which limits their generalizability across various multimodal tasks. In fact, there are numerous multimodal tasks requiring diverse reasoning skills, such as zooming in on a specific region or marking an object within an image. To address this, we propose unified generative multimodal reasoning, which unifies diverse multimodal reasoning skills by generating intermediate images during the reasoning process. We instantiate this paradigm with Omni-R1, a two-stage SFT+RL framework featuring perception alignment loss and perception reward, thereby enabling functional image generation. Additionally, we introduce Omni-R1-Zero, which eliminates the need for multimodal annotations by bootstrapping step-wise visualizations from text-only reasoning data. Empirical results show that Omni-R1 achieves unified generative reasoning across a wide range of multimodal tasks, and Omni-R1-Zero can match or even surpass Omni-R1 on average, suggesting a promising direction for generative multimodal reasoning.

Visual reasoning, a cornerstone of human intelligence, encompasses complex perceptual and logical processes essential for solving diverse visual problems. While advances in computer vision have produced powerful models for various perceptual tasks, leveraging these for general visual reasoning remains challenging. Prior work demonstrates that augmenting LLMs with vision models via supervised finetuning improves performance, but faces key limitations such as expensive data generation, reliance on careful data filtering, and poor generalization. To address these issues, we propose ReVPT to enhance multi-modal LLMs' abilities to reason about and use visual tools through reinforcement learning. We introduce a novel RL algorithm based on GRPO, designed to train models to reason with a suite of four visual tools. Through extensive experiments, we show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on several perception-heavy benchmarks, including SAT, CV-Bench, BLINK and MMStar, significantly outperforming the supervised and text-based RL finetuning baselines. Notably, Our ReVPT-3B and ReVPT-7B outperform the instruct models by 9.03% and 9.44% on CV-Bench. Finally, we bring to the community new insights on RL-based visual tool-usage through extensive ablations. Our code is available at https://github.com/ls-kelvin/REVPT.

Understanding the physical world - governed by laws of motion, spatial relations, and causality - poses a fundamental challenge for multimodal large language models (MLLMs). While recent advances such as OpenAI o3 and GPT-4o demonstrate impressive perceptual and reasoning capabilities, our investigation reveals these models struggle profoundly with visual physical reasoning, failing to grasp basic physical laws, spatial interactions, and causal effects in complex scenes. More importantly, they often fail to follow coherent reasoning chains grounded in visual evidence, especially when multiple steps are needed to arrive at the correct answer. To rigorously evaluate this capability, we introduce MVPBench, a curated benchmark designed to rigorously evaluate visual physical reasoning through the lens of visual chain-of-thought (CoT). Each example features interleaved multi-image inputs and demands not only the correct final answer but also a coherent, step-by-step reasoning path grounded in evolving visual cues. This setup mirrors how humans reason through real-world physical processes over time. To ensure fine-grained evaluation, we introduce a graph-based CoT consistency metric that verifies whether the reasoning path of model adheres to valid physical logic. Additionally, we minimize shortcut exploitation from text priors, encouraging models to rely on visual understanding. Experimental results reveal a concerning trend: even cutting-edge MLLMs exhibit poor visual reasoning accuracy and weak image-text alignment in physical domains. Surprisingly, RL-based post-training alignment - commonly believed to improve visual reasoning performance - often harms spatial reasoning, suggesting a need to rethink current fine-tuning practices.

Visual reasoning is central to human cognition, enabling individuals to interpret and abstractly understand their environment. Although recent Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance across language and vision-language tasks, existing benchmarks primarily measure recognition-based skills and inadequately assess true visual reasoning capabilities. To bridge this critical gap, we introduce VERIFY, a benchmark explicitly designed to isolate and rigorously evaluate the visual reasoning capabilities of state-of-the-art MLLMs. VERIFY compels models to reason primarily from visual information, providing minimal textual context to reduce reliance on domain-specific knowledge and linguistic biases. Each problem is accompanied by a human-annotated reasoning path, making it the first to provide in-depth evaluation of model decision-making processes. Additionally, we propose novel metrics that assess visual reasoning fidelity beyond mere accuracy, highlighting critical imbalances in current model reasoning patterns. Our comprehensive benchmarking of leading MLLMs uncovers significant limitations, underscoring the need for a balanced and holistic approach to both perception and reasoning. For more teaser and testing, visit our project page (https://verify-eqh.pages.dev/).

Chain-of-thought reasoning has significantly improved the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) across various domains. However, this reasoning process has been confined exclusively to textual space, limiting its effectiveness in visually intensive tasks. To address this limitation, we introduce the concept of reasoning in the pixel-space. Within this novel framework, Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are equipped with a suite of visual reasoning operations, such as zoom-in and select-frame. These operations enable VLMs to directly inspect, interrogate, and infer from visual evidences, thereby enhancing reasoning fidelity for visual tasks. Cultivating such pixel-space reasoning capabilities in VLMs presents notable challenges, including the model's initially imbalanced competence and its reluctance to adopt the newly introduced pixel-space operations. We address these challenges through a two-phase training approach. The first phase employs instruction tuning on synthesized reasoning traces to familiarize the model with the novel visual operations. Following this, a reinforcement learning (RL) phase leverages a curiosity-driven reward scheme to balance exploration between pixel-space reasoning and textual reasoning. With these visual operations, VLMs can interact with complex visual inputs, such as information-rich images or videos to proactively gather necessary information. We demonstrate that this approach significantly improves VLM performance across diverse visual reasoning benchmarks. Our 7B model, \model, achieves 84\% on V* bench, 74\% on TallyQA-Complex, and 84\% on InfographicsVQA, marking the highest accuracy achieved by any open-source model to date. These results highlight the importance of pixel-space reasoning and the effectiveness of our framework.

Current Large Language Models have achieved Olympiad-level logic, yet Vision-Language Models paradoxically falter on elementary spatial tasks like block counting. This capability mismatch reveals a critical ``spatial intelligence gap,'' where models fail to construct coherent 3D mental representations from 2D observations. We uncover this gap via diagnostic analyses showing the bottleneck is a missing view-consistent spatial interface rather than insufficient visual features or weak reasoning. To bridge this, we introduce 3ViewSense, a framework that grounds spatial reasoning in Orthographic Views. Drawing on engineering cognition, we propose a ``Simulate-and-Reason'' mechanism that decomposes complex scenes into canonical orthographic projections to resolve geometric ambiguities. By aligning egocentric perceptions with these allocentric references, our method facilitates explicit mental rotation and reconstruction. Empirical results on spatial reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms existing baselines, with consistent gains on occlusion-heavy counting and view-consistent spatial reasoning. The framework also improves the stability and consistency of spatial descriptions, offering a scalable path toward stronger spatial intelligence in multimodal systems.

Visual reasoning is dominated by end-to-end neural networks scaled to billions of model parameters and training examples. However, even the largest models struggle with compositional reasoning, generalization, fine-grained spatial and temporal reasoning, and counting. Visual reasoning with large language models (LLMs) as controllers can, in principle, address these limitations by decomposing the task and solving subtasks by orchestrating a set of (visual) tools. Recently, these models achieved great performance on tasks such as compositional visual question answering, visual grounding, and video temporal reasoning. Nevertheless, in their current form, these models heavily rely on human engineering of in-context examples in the prompt, which are often dataset- and task-specific and require significant labor by highly skilled programmers. In this work, we present a framework that mitigates these issues by introducing spatially and temporally abstract routines and by leveraging a small number of labeled examples to automatically generate in-context examples, thereby avoiding human-created in-context examples. On a number of visual reasoning tasks, we show that our framework leads to consistent gains in performance, makes LLMs as controllers setup more robust, and removes the need for human engineering of in-context examples.

Vision-language models (VLMs) have shown impressive zero- and few-shot performance on real-world visual question answering (VQA) benchmarks, alluding to their capabilities as visual reasoning engines. However, the benchmarks being used conflate "pure" visual reasoning with world knowledge, and also have questions that involve a limited number of reasoning steps. Thus, it remains unclear whether a VLM's apparent visual reasoning performance is due to its world knowledge, or due to actual visual reasoning capabilities. To clarify this ambiguity, we systematically benchmark and dissect the zero-shot visual reasoning capabilities of VLMs through synthetic datasets that require minimal world knowledge, and allow for analysis over a broad range of reasoning steps. We focus on two novel aspects of zero-shot visual reasoning: i) evaluating the impact of conveying scene information as either visual embeddings or purely textual scene descriptions to the underlying large language model (LLM) of the VLM, and ii) comparing the effectiveness of chain-of-thought prompting to standard prompting for zero-shot visual reasoning. We find that the underlying LLMs, when provided textual scene descriptions, consistently perform better compared to being provided visual embeddings. In particular, 18% higher accuracy is achieved on the PTR dataset. We also find that CoT prompting performs marginally better than standard prompting only for the comparatively large GPT-3.5-Turbo (175B) model, and does worse for smaller-scale models. This suggests the emergence of CoT abilities for visual reasoning in LLMs at larger scales even when world knowledge is limited. Overall, we find limitations in the abilities of VLMs and LLMs for more complex visual reasoning, and highlight the important role that LLMs can play in visual reasoning.

We present Phi-4-reasoning-vision-15B, a compact open-weight multimodal reasoning model, and share the motivations, design choices, experiments, and learnings that informed its development. Our goal is to contribute practical insight to the research community on building smaller, efficient multimodal reasoning models and to share the result of these learnings as an open-weight model that is good at common vision and language tasks and excels at scientific and mathematical reasoning and understanding user interfaces. Our contributions include demonstrating that careful architecture choices and rigorous data curation enable smaller, open-weight multimodal models to achieve competitive performance with significantly less training and inference-time compute and tokens. The most substantial improvements come from systematic filtering, error correction, and synthetic augmentation -- reinforcing that data quality remains the primary lever for model performance. Systematic ablations show that high-resolution, dynamic-resolution encoders yield consistent improvements, as accurate perception is a prerequisite for high-quality reasoning. Finally, a hybrid mix of reasoning and non-reasoning data with explicit mode tokens allows a single model to deliver fast direct answers for simpler tasks and chain-of-thought reasoning for complex problems.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) struggle to translate high-level instructions into the precise spatial affordances required for robotic manipulation. While visual Chain-of-Thought (CoT) methods exist, they are often computationally intensive. In this work, we introduce TRACE (Textual Reasoning for Affordance Coordinate Extraction), a novel methodology that integrates a textual Chain of Reasoning (CoR) into the affordance prediction process. We use this methodology to create the TRACE dataset, a large-scale collection created via an autonomous pipeline that pairs instructions with explicit textual rationales. By fine-tuning a VLM on this data, our model learns to externalize its spatial reasoning before acting. Our experiments show that our TRACE-tuned model achieves state-of-the-art performance, reaching 48.1% accuracy on the primary Where2Place (W2P) benchmark (a 9.6% relative improvement) and 55.0% on the more challenging W2P(h) subset. Crucially, an ablation study demonstrates that performance scales directly with the amount of reasoning data used, confirming the CoR's effectiveness. Furthermore, analysis of the model's attention maps reveals an interpretable reasoning process where focus shifts dynamically across reasoning steps. This work shows that training VLMs to generate a textual CoR is an effective and robust strategy for enhancing the precision, reliability, and interpretability of VLM-based robot control. Our dataset and code are available at https://github.com/jink-ucla/TRACE

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.

Understanding perspective is fundamental to human visual perception, yet the extent to which multimodal large language models (MLLMs) internalize perspective geometry remains unclear. We introduce MMPerspective, the first benchmark specifically designed to systematically evaluate MLLMs' understanding of perspective through 10 carefully crafted tasks across three complementary dimensions: Perspective Perception, Reasoning, and Robustness. Our benchmark comprises 2,711 real-world and synthetic image instances with 5,083 question-answer pairs that probe key capabilities, such as vanishing point perception and counting, perspective type reasoning, line relationship understanding in 3D space, invariance to perspective-preserving transformations, etc. Through a comprehensive evaluation of 43 state-of-the-art MLLMs, we uncover significant limitations: while models demonstrate competence on surface-level perceptual tasks, they struggle with compositional reasoning and maintaining spatial consistency under perturbations. Our analysis further reveals intriguing patterns between model architecture, scale, and perspective capabilities, highlighting both robustness bottlenecks and the benefits of chain-of-thought prompting. MMPerspective establishes a valuable testbed for diagnosing and advancing spatial understanding in vision-language systems. Resources available at: https://yunlong10.github.io/MMPerspective/

Recent advances in text-only "slow-thinking" reasoning have prompted efforts to transfer this capability to vision-language models (VLMs), for training visual reasoning models (VRMs). owever, such transfer faces critical challenges: Effective "slow thinking" in VRMs requires visual reflection, the ability to check the reasoning process based on visual information. Through quantitative analysis, we observe that current VRMs exhibit limited visual reflection, as their attention to visual information diminishes rapidly with longer generated responses. To address this challenge, we propose a new VRM Reflection-V, which enhances visual reflection based on reasoning data construction for cold-start and reward design for reinforcement learning (RL). Firstly, we construct vision-centered reasoning data by leveraging an agent that interacts between VLMs and reasoning LLMs, enabling cold-start learning of visual reflection patterns. Secondly, a visual attention based reward model is employed during RL to encourage reasoning based on visual information. Therefore, Reflection-V demonstrates significant improvements across multiple visual reasoning benchmarks. Furthermore, Reflection-V maintains a stronger and more consistent reliance on visual information during visual reasoning, indicating effective enhancement in visual reflection capabilities.

Interleaved reasoning paradigms enhance Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) with visual feedback but are hindered by the prohibitive computational cost of re-encoding pixel-dense images. A promising alternative, latent visual reasoning, circumvents this bottleneck yet faces limitations: methods either fail to capture intermediate state evolution due to single-step, non-interleaved structures, or sacrifice precise perceptual modeling by over-compressing features. We introduce Interleaved Latent Visual Reasoning (ILVR), a framework that unifies dynamic state evolution with precise perceptual modeling. ILVR interleaves textual generation with latent visual representations that act as specific, evolving cues for subsequent reasoning. Specifically, we employ a self-supervision strategy where a momentum teacher model selectively distills relevant features from ground-truth intermediate images into sparse supervision targets. This adaptive selection mechanism guides the model to autonomously generate context-aware visual signals. Extensive experiments on multimodal reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that ILVR outperforms existing approaches, effectively bridging the gap between fine-grained perception and sequential multimodal reasoning. The code is available at https://github.com/XD111ds/ILVR.

Visual understanding goes well beyond object recognition. With one glance at an image, we can effortlessly imagine the world beyond the pixels: for instance, we can infer people's actions, goals, and mental states. While this task is easy for humans, it is tremendously difficult for today's vision systems, requiring higher-order cognition and commonsense reasoning about the world. We formalize this task as Visual Commonsense Reasoning. Given a challenging question about an image, a machine must answer correctly and then provide a rationale justifying its answer. Next, we introduce a new dataset, VCR, consisting of 290k multiple choice QA problems derived from 110k movie scenes. The key recipe for generating non-trivial and high-quality problems at scale is Adversarial Matching, a new approach to transform rich annotations into multiple choice questions with minimal bias. Experimental results show that while humans find VCR easy (over 90% accuracy), state-of-the-art vision models struggle (~45%). To move towards cognition-level understanding, we present a new reasoning engine, Recognition to Cognition Networks (R2C), that models the necessary layered inferences for grounding, contextualization, and reasoning. R2C helps narrow the gap between humans and machines (~65%); still, the challenge is far from solved, and we provide analysis that suggests avenues for future work.

The commonsense reasoning capabilities of vision-language models (VLMs), especially in abductive reasoning and defeasible reasoning, remain poorly understood. Most benchmarks focus on typical visual scenarios, making it difficult to discern whether model performance stems from keen perception and reasoning skills, or reliance on pure statistical recall. We argue that by focusing on atypical events in videos, clearer insights can be gained on the core capabilities of VLMs. Explaining and understanding such out-of-distribution events requires models to extend beyond basic pattern recognition and regurgitation of their prior knowledge. To this end, we introduce BlackSwanSuite, a benchmark for evaluating VLMs' ability to reason about unexpected events through abductive and defeasible tasks. Our tasks artificially limit the amount of visual information provided to models while questioning them about hidden unexpected events, or provide new visual information that could change an existing hypothesis about the event. We curate a comprehensive benchmark suite comprising over 3,800 MCQ, 4,900 generative and 6,700 yes/no tasks, spanning 1,655 videos. After extensively evaluating various state-of-the-art VLMs, including GPT-4o and Gemini 1.5 Pro, as well as open-source VLMs such as LLaVA-Video, we find significant performance gaps of up to 32% from humans on these tasks. Our findings reveal key limitations in current VLMs, emphasizing the need for enhanced model architectures and training strategies.

Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in video reasoning via Chain-of-Thought (CoT). However, the robustness of their reasoning chains remains questionable. In this paper, we identify a critical failure mode termed textual inertia, where once a textual hallucination occurs in the thinking process, models tend to blindly adhere to the erroneous text while neglecting conflicting visual evidence. To systematically investigate this, we propose the LogicGraph Perturbation Protocol that structurally injects perturbations into the reasoning chains of diverse LMMs spanning both native reasoning architectures and prompt-driven paradigms to evaluate their self-reflection capabilities. The results reveal that models successfully self-correct in less than 10% of cases and predominantly succumb to blind textual error propagation. To mitigate this, we introduce Active Visual-Context Refinement, a training-free inference paradigm which orchestrates an active visual re-grounding mechanism to enforce fine-grained verification coupled with an adaptive context refinement strategy to summarize and denoise the reasoning history. Experiments demonstrate that our approach significantly stifles hallucination propagation and enhances reasoning robustness.

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.

Embodied question answering (EQA) in 3D environments often requires collecting context that is distributed across multiple viewpoints and partially occluded. However, most recent vision--language models (VLMs) are constrained to a fixed and finite set of input views, which limits their ability to acquire question-relevant context at inference time and hinders complex spatial reasoning. We propose Chain-of-View (CoV) prompting, a training-free, test-time reasoning framework that transforms a VLM into an active viewpoint reasoner through a coarse-to-fine exploration process. CoV first employs a View Selection agent to filter redundant frames and identify question-aligned anchor views. It then performs fine-grained view adjustment by interleaving iterative reasoning with discrete camera actions, obtaining new observations from the underlying 3D scene representation until sufficient context is gathered or a step budget is reached. We evaluate CoV on OpenEQA across four mainstream VLMs and obtain an average +11.56\% improvement in LLM-Match, with a maximum gain of +13.62\% on Qwen3-VL-Flash. CoV further exhibits test-time scaling: increasing the minimum action budget yields an additional +2.51\% average improvement, peaking at +3.73\% on Gemini-2.5-Flash. On ScanQA and SQA3D, CoV delivers strong performance (e.g., 116 CIDEr / 31.9 EM@1 on ScanQA and 51.1 EM@1 on SQA3D). Overall, these results suggest that question-aligned view selection coupled with open-view search is an effective, model-agnostic strategy for improving spatial reasoning in 3D EQA without additional training.

We study how large language models (LLMs) ``think'' through their representation space. We propose a novel geometric framework that models an LLM's reasoning as flows -- embedding trajectories evolving where logic goes. We disentangle logical structure from semantics by employing the same natural deduction propositions with varied semantic carriers, allowing us to test whether LLMs internalize logic beyond surface form. This perspective connects reasoning with geometric quantities such as position, velocity, and curvature, enabling formal analysis in representation and concept spaces. Our theory establishes: (1) LLM reasoning corresponds to smooth flows in representation space, and (2) logical statements act as local controllers of these flows' velocities. Using learned representation proxies, we design controlled experiments to visualize and quantify reasoning flows, providing empirical validation of our theoretical framework. Our work serves as both a conceptual foundation and practical tools for studying reasoning phenomenon, offering a new lens for interpretability and formal analysis of LLMs' behavior.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have achieved remarkable progress across tasks such as visual question answering and image captioning. Yet, the extent to which these models perform visual reasoning as opposed to relying on linguistic priors remains unclear. To address this, we introduce VisRes Bench, a benchmark designed to study visual reasoning in naturalistic settings without contextual language supervision. Analyzing model behavior across three levels of complexity, we uncover clear limitations in perceptual and relational visual reasoning capacities. VisRes isolates distinct reasoning abilities across its levels. Level 1 probes perceptual completion and global image matching under perturbations such as blur, texture changes, occlusion, and rotation; Level 2 tests rule-based inference over a single attribute (e.g., color, count, orientation); and Level 3 targets compositional reasoning that requires integrating multiple visual attributes. Across more than 19,000 controlled task images, we find that state-of-the-art VLMs perform near random under subtle perceptual perturbations, revealing limited abstraction beyond pattern recognition. We conclude by discussing how VisRes provides a unified framework for advancing abstract visual reasoning in multimodal research.

Language models have recently advanced into the realm of reasoning, yet it is through multimodal reasoning that we can fully unlock the potential to achieve more comprehensive, human-like cognitive capabilities. This survey provides a systematic overview of the recent multimodal reasoning approaches, categorizing them into two levels: language-centric multimodal reasoning and collaborative multimodal reasoning. The former encompasses one-pass visual perception and active visual perception, where vision primarily serves a supporting role in language reasoning. The latter involves action generation and state update within reasoning process, enabling a more dynamic interaction between modalities. Furthermore, we analyze the technical evolution of these methods, discuss their inherent challenges, and introduce key benchmark tasks and evaluation metrics for assessing multimodal reasoning performance. Finally, we provide insights into future research directions from the following two perspectives: (i) from visual-language reasoning to omnimodal reasoning and (ii) from multimodal reasoning to multimodal agents. This survey aims to provide a structured overview that will inspire further advancements in multimodal reasoning research.

Recent advancements demonstrated by DeepSeek-R1 have shown that complex reasoning abilities in large language models (LLMs), including sophisticated behaviors such as self-verification and self-correction, can be achieved by RL with verifiable rewards and significantly improves model performance on challenging tasks such as AIME. Motivated by these findings, our study investigates whether similar reasoning capabilities can be successfully integrated into large vision-language models (LVLMs) and assesses their impact on challenging multimodal reasoning tasks. We consider an approach that iteratively leverages supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on lightweight training data and Reinforcement Learning (RL) to further improve model generalization. Initially, reasoning capabilities were distilled from pure-text R1 models by generating reasoning steps using high-quality captions of the images sourced from diverse visual datasets. Subsequently, iterative RL training further enhance reasoning skills, with each iteration's RL-improved model generating refined SFT datasets for the next round. This iterative process yielded OpenVLThinker, a LVLM exhibiting consistently improved reasoning performance on challenging benchmarks such as MathVista, MathVerse, and MathVision, demonstrating the potential of our strategy for robust vision-language reasoning. The code, model and data are held at https://github.com/yihedeng9/OpenVLThinker.

Top-view perspective denotes a typical way in which humans read and reason over different types of maps, and it is vital for localization and navigation of humans as well as of `non-human' agents, such as the ones backed by large Vision-Language Models (VLMs). Nonetheless, spatial reasoning capabilities of modern VLMs remain unattested and underexplored. In this work, we thus study their capability to understand and reason over spatial relations from the top view. The focus on top view also enables controlled evaluations at different granularity of spatial reasoning; we clearly disentangle different abilities (e.g., recognizing particular objects versus understanding their relative positions). We introduce the TopViewRS (Top-View Reasoning in Space) dataset, consisting of 11,384 multiple-choice questions with either realistic or semantic top-view map as visual input. We then use it to study and evaluate VLMs across 4 perception and reasoning tasks with different levels of complexity. Evaluation of 10 representative open- and closed-source VLMs reveals the gap of more than 50% compared to average human performance, and it is even lower than the random baseline in some cases. Although additional experiments show that Chain-of-Thought reasoning can boost model capabilities by 5.82% on average, the overall performance of VLMs remains limited. Our findings underscore the critical need for enhanced model capability in top-view spatial reasoning and set a foundation for further research towards human-level proficiency of VLMs in real-world multimodal tasks.

Recent advances in large language models elicit reasoning in a chain of thought that allows models to decompose problems in a human-like fashion. Though this paradigm improves multi-step reasoning ability in language models, it is limited by being unimodal and applied mainly to question-answering tasks. We claim that incorporating visual augmentation into reasoning is essential, especially for complex, imaginative tasks. Consequently, we introduce VCoT, a novel method that leverages chain of thought prompting with vision-language grounding to recursively bridge the logical gaps within sequential data. Our method uses visual guidance to generate synthetic multimodal infillings that add consistent and novel information to reduce the logical gaps for downstream tasks that can benefit from temporal reasoning, as well as provide interpretability into models' multi-step reasoning. We apply VCoT to the Visual Storytelling and WikiHow summarization datasets and demonstrate through human evaluation that VCoT offers novel and consistent synthetic data augmentation beating chain of thought baselines, which can be used to enhance downstream performance.

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning in vision language models (VLMs) is crucial for improving interpretability and trustworthiness. However, current training recipes lack robust CoT reasoning data, relying on datasets dominated by short annotations with minimal rationales. In this work, we show that training VLM on short answers does not generalize well to reasoning tasks that require more detailed responses. To address this, we propose a two-fold approach. First, we distill rationales from GPT-4o model to enrich the training data and fine-tune VLMs, boosting their CoT performance. Second, we apply reinforcement learning to further calibrate reasoning quality. Specifically, we construct positive (correct) and negative (incorrect) pairs of model-generated reasoning chains, by comparing their predictions with annotated short answers. Using this pairwise data, we apply the Direct Preference Optimization algorithm to refine the model's reasoning abilities. Our experiments demonstrate significant improvements in CoT reasoning on benchmark datasets and better generalization to direct answer prediction as well. This work emphasizes the importance of incorporating detailed rationales in training and leveraging reinforcement learning to strengthen the reasoning capabilities of VLMs.

Vision Language Models (VLMs) demonstrate remarkable proficiency in addressing a wide array of visual questions, which requires strong perception and reasoning faculties. Assessing these two competencies independently is crucial for model refinement, despite the inherent difficulty due to the intertwined nature of seeing and reasoning in existing VLMs. To tackle this issue, we present Prism, an innovative framework designed to disentangle the perception and reasoning processes involved in visual question solving. Prism comprises two distinct stages: a perception stage that utilizes a VLM to extract and articulate visual information in textual form, and a reasoning stage that formulates responses based on the extracted visual information using a Large Language Model (LLM). This modular design enables the systematic comparison and assessment of both proprietary and open-source VLM for their perception and reasoning strengths. Our analytical framework provides several valuable insights, underscoring Prism's potential as a cost-effective solution for vision-language tasks. By combining a streamlined VLM focused on perception with a powerful LLM tailored for reasoning, Prism achieves superior results in general vision-language tasks while substantially cutting down on training and operational expenses. Quantitative evaluations show that Prism, when configured with a vanilla 2B LLaVA and freely accessible GPT-3.5, delivers performance on par with VLMs 10 times larger on the rigorous multimodal benchmark MMStar. The project is released at: https://github.com/SparksJoe/Prism.

Large vision-language models (LVLMs) augment language models with visual understanding, enabling multimodal reasoning. However, due to the modality gap between textual and visual data, they often face significant challenges, such as over-reliance on text priors, hallucinations, and limited capacity for complex visual reasoning. Existing benchmarks to evaluate visual reasoning in LVLMs often rely on schematic or synthetic images and on imprecise machine-generated explanations. To bridge the modality gap, we present DrivingVQA, a new benchmark derived from driving theory tests to evaluate visual chain-of-thought reasoning in complex real-world scenarios. It offers 3,931 expert-crafted multiple-choice problems and interleaved explanations grounded with entities relevant to the reasoning process. We leverage this dataset to perform an extensive study of LVLMs' ability to reason about complex visual scenarios. Our experiments reveal that open-source and proprietary LVLMs struggle with visual chain-of-thought reasoning under zero-shot settings. We investigate training strategies that leverage relevant entities to improve visual reasoning. Notably, we observe a performance boost of up to 7\% when reasoning over image tokens of cropped regions tied to these entities.

Multi-view spatial reasoning remains difficult for current vision-language models. Even when multiple viewpoints are available, models often underutilize cross-view relations and instead rely on single-image shortcuts, leading to fragile performance on viewpoint transformation and occlusion-sensitive cases. We present ViewFusion, a two-stage framework that explicitly separates cross-view spatial pre-alignment from question answering. In the first stage, the model performs deliberate spatial pre-thinking to infer viewpoint relations and spatial transformations across views, forming an intermediate workspace that goes beyond a simple re-description. In the second stage, the model conducts question-driven reasoning conditioned on this workspace to produce the final prediction. We train ViewFusion with synthetic reasoning supervision followed by reinforcement learning using GRPO, which improves answer correctness while stabilizing the intended two-stage generation behavior. On MMSI-Bench, ViewFusion improves accuracy by 5.3\% over Qwen3-VL-4B-Instruct, with the largest gains on examples that require genuine cross-view alignment.

Chain of thought reasoning has demonstrated remarkable success in large language models, yet its adaptation to vision-language reasoning remains an open challenge with unclear best practices. Existing attempts typically employ reasoning chains at a coarse-grained level, which struggles to perform fine-grained structured reasoning and, more importantly, are difficult to evaluate the reward and quality of intermediate reasoning. In this work, we delve into chain of step reasoning for vision-language models, enabling assessing reasoning step quality accurately and leading to effective reinforcement learning and inference-time scaling with fine-grained rewards. We present a simple, effective, and fully transparent framework, including the step-level reasoning data, process reward model (PRM), and reinforcement learning training. With the proposed approaches, our models set strong baselines with consistent improvements on challenging vision-language benchmarks. More importantly, we conduct a thorough empirical analysis and ablation study, unveiling the impact of each component and several intriguing properties of inference-time scaling. We believe this paper serves as a baseline for vision-language models and offers insights into more complex multimodal reasoning. Our dataset, PRM, and code will be available at https://github.com/baaivision/CoS.

Recent strides in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have significantly advanced their performance in many reasoning tasks. However, Abstract Visual Reasoning (AVR) remains a critical challenge, primarily due to limitations in perceiving abstract graphics. To tackle this issue, we investigate the bottlenecks in current MLLMs and synthesize training data to improve their abstract visual perception. First, we propose VisuRiddles, a benchmark for AVR, featuring tasks meticulously constructed to assess models' reasoning capacities across five core dimensions and two high-level reasoning categories. Second, we introduce the Perceptual Riddle Synthesizer (PRS), an automated framework for generating riddles with fine-grained perceptual descriptions. PRS not only generates valuable training data for abstract graphics but also provides fine-grained perceptual description, crucially allowing for supervision over intermediate reasoning stages and thereby improving both training efficacy and model interpretability. Our extensive experimental results on VisuRiddles empirically validate that fine-grained visual perception is the principal bottleneck and our synthesis framework markedly enhances the performance of contemporary MLLMs on these challenging tasks. Our code and dataset will be released at https://github.com/yh-hust/VisuRiddles

Language-Image Pre-training has demonstrated promising results on zero-shot and few-shot downstream tasks by prompting visual models with natural language prompts. However, most recent studies only use a single prompt for tuning, neglecting the inherent step-to-step cognitive reasoning process that humans conduct in complex task settings, for example, when processing images from unfamiliar domains. Chain of Thought is a simple and effective approximation to human reasoning process and has been proven useful for natural language processing (NLP) tasks. Based on this cognitive intuition, we believe that conducting effective reasoning is also an important problem in visual tasks, and a chain of thought could be a solution to this problem. In this work, we propose a novel chain of thought prompt tuning for vision-language modeling. Extensive experiments show that our method not only generalizes better in image classification tasks, has greater transferability beyond a single dataset, and has stronger domain generalization performance, but also performs much better in imagetext retrieval and visual question answering, which require more reasoning capabilities. We are the first to successfully adapt chain-of-thought prompting that combines visual and textual embeddings. We will release our codes

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.

Visual reasoning -- the ability to interpret the visual world -- is crucial for embodied agents that operate within three-dimensional scenes. Progress in AI has led to vision and language models capable of answering questions from images. However, their performance declines when tasked with 3D spatial reasoning. To tackle the complexity of such reasoning problems, we introduce an agentic program synthesis approach where LLM agents collaboratively generate a Pythonic API with new functions to solve common subproblems. Our method overcomes limitations of prior approaches that rely on a static, human-defined API, allowing it to handle a wider range of queries. To assess AI capabilities for 3D understanding, we introduce a new benchmark of queries involving multiple steps of grounding and inference. We show that our method outperforms prior zero-shot models for visual reasoning in 3D and empirically validate the effectiveness of our agentic framework for 3D spatial reasoning tasks. Project website: https://glab-caltech.github.io/vadar/

Vision-Language Models have excelled at textual reasoning, but they often struggle with fine-grained spatial understanding and continuous action planning, failing to simulate the dynamics required for complex visual reasoning. In this work, we formulate visual reasoning by means of video generation models, positing that generated frames can act as intermediate reasoning steps between initial states and solutions. We evaluate their capacity in two distinct regimes: Maze Navigation for sequential discrete planning with low visual change and Tangram Puzzle for continuous manipulation with high visual change. Our experiments reveal three critical insights: (1) Robust Zero-Shot Generalization: In both tasks, the model demonstrates strong performance on unseen data distributions without specific finetuning. (2) Visual Context: The model effectively uses visual context as explicit control, such as agent icons and tangram shapes, enabling it to maintain high visual consistency and adapt its planning capability robustly to unseen patterns. (3) Visual Test-Time Scaling: We observe a test-time scaling law in sequential planning; increasing the generated video length (visual inference budget) empowers better zero-shot generalization to spatially and temporally complex paths. These findings suggest that video generation is not merely a media tool, but a scalable, generalizable paradigm for visual reasoning.

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have demonstrated impressive general capabilities across a wide range of multi-modal tasks. However, the reasoning processes of LVLMs often suffer from unreliable outputs and limited interpretability. To address this, grounded visual reasoning has emerged as a promising paradigm that enforces responses anchored on salient visual evidence regions. However, existing approaches typically rely on costly supervision such as bounding box annotations, chain-of-thought rationale or external tool calls, limiting their scalability. In this work, we propose Ground-R1, a reinforcement learning framework that enables grounded visual reasoning without requiring explicit evidence or rationale annotations. Ground-R1 consists of a grounding phase that generates evidence region rollouts based on format constraints, and an answering phase that produces responses guided by both answer correctness and format adherence rewards. Extensive experiments across multiple visual reasoning benchmarks manifest that Ground-R1 achieves superior performance and exhibits emergent cognitive behaviors such as uncertainty awareness, spatial perception, and iterative refinement, offering a scalable and interpretable alternative to existing approaches.

Reasoning is a fundamental capability for solving complex multi-step problems, particularly in visual contexts where sequential step-wise understanding is essential. Existing approaches lack a comprehensive framework for evaluating visual reasoning and do not emphasize step-wise problem-solving. To this end, we propose a comprehensive framework for advancing step-by-step visual reasoning in large language models (LMMs) through three key contributions. First, we introduce a visual reasoning benchmark specifically designed to evaluate multi-step reasoning tasks. The benchmark presents a diverse set of challenges with eight different categories ranging from complex visual perception to scientific reasoning with over 4k reasoning steps in total, enabling robust evaluation of LLMs' abilities to perform accurate and interpretable visual reasoning across multiple steps. Second, we propose a novel metric that assesses visual reasoning quality at the granularity of individual steps, emphasizing both correctness and logical coherence. The proposed metric offers deeper insights into reasoning performance compared to traditional end-task accuracy metrics. Third, we present a new multimodal visual reasoning model, named LlamaV-o1, trained using a multi-step curriculum learning approach, where tasks are progressively organized to facilitate incremental skill acquisition and problem-solving. The proposed LlamaV-o1 is designed for multi-step reasoning and learns step-by-step through a structured training paradigm. Extensive experiments show that our LlamaV-o1 outperforms existing open-source models and performs favorably against close-source proprietary models. Compared to the recent Llava-CoT, our LlamaV-o1 achieves an average score of 67.3 with an absolute gain of 3.8\% across six benchmarks while being 5 times faster during inference scaling. Our benchmark, model, and code are publicly available.

Rapid progress in video models has largely focused on visual quality, leaving their reasoning capabilities underexplored. Video reasoning grounds intelligence in spatiotemporally consistent visual environments that go beyond what text can naturally capture, enabling intuitive reasoning over spatiotemporal structure such as continuity, interaction, and causality. However, systematically studying video reasoning and its scaling behavior is hindered by the lack of large-scale training data. To address this gap, we introduce the Very Big Video Reasoning (VBVR) Dataset, an unprecedentedly large-scale resource spanning 200 curated reasoning tasks following a principled taxonomy and over one million video clips, approximately three orders of magnitude larger than existing datasets. We further present VBVR-Bench, a verifiable evaluation framework that moves beyond model-based judging by incorporating rule-based, human-aligned scorers, enabling reproducible and interpretable diagnosis of video reasoning capabilities. Leveraging the VBVR suite, we conduct one of the first large-scale scaling studies of video reasoning and observe early signs of emergent generalization to unseen reasoning tasks. Together, VBVR lays a foundation for the next stage of research in generalizable video reasoning. The data, benchmark toolkit, and models are publicly available at https://video-reason.com/ .

We present a central-peripheral vision-inspired framework (CVP), a simple yet effective multimodal model for spatial reasoning that draws inspiration from the two types of human visual fields -- central vision and peripheral vision. Existing approaches primarily rely on unstructured representations, such as point clouds, voxels, or patch features, and inject scene context implicitly via coordinate embeddings. However, this often results in limited spatial reasoning capabilities due to the lack of explicit, high-level structural understanding. To address this limitation, we introduce two complementary components into a Large Multimodal Model-based architecture: target-affinity token, analogous to central vision, that guides the model's attention toward query-relevant objects; and allocentric grid, akin to peripheral vision, that captures global scene context and spatial arrangements. These components work in tandem to enable structured, context-aware understanding of complex 3D environments. Experiments show that CVP achieves state-of-the-art performance across a range of 3D scene understanding benchmarks.

Video reasoning, the task of enabling machines to infer from dynamic visual content through multi-step logic, is crucial for advanced AI. While the Chain-of-Thought (CoT) mechanism has enhanced reasoning in text-based tasks, its application to video understanding remains underexplored. This paper presents a systematic analysis revealing that CoT often degrades performance in video reasoning, generating verbose but misleading internal monologues, and leading to hallucinated visual details and overridden correct intuitions - a phenomenon we term "visual thinking drift". We explain this drift through a Bayesian lens, positing that CoT traces often diverge from actual visual evidence, instead amplifying internal biases or language priors, causing models to storytell rather than engage in grounded reasoning. To counteract this, we introduce Visual Evidence Reward (VER), a novel reinforcement learning framework that explicitly rewards the generation of reasoning traces that are verifiably grounded in visual evidence. Comprehensive evaluation across 10 diverse video understanding benchmarks demonstrates that our Video-VER consistently achieves top performance. Our work sheds light on the distinct challenges of video-centric reasoning and encourages the development of AI that robustly grounds its inferences in visual evidence - for large multimodal models that not only "think before answering", but also "see while thinking".

Reasoning has emerged as a key capability of large language models. In linguistic tasks, this capability can be enhanced by self-improving techniques that refine reasoning paths for subsequent finetuning. However, extending these language-based self-improving approaches to vision language models (VLMs) presents a unique challenge:~visual hallucinations in reasoning paths cannot be effectively verified or rectified. Our solution starts with a key observation about visual contrast: when presented with a contrastive VQA pair, i.e., two visually similar images with synonymous questions, VLMs identify relevant visual cues more precisely. Motivated by this observation, we propose Visual Contrastive Self-Taught Reasoner (VC-STaR), a novel self-improving framework that leverages visual contrast to mitigate hallucinations in model-generated rationales. We collect a diverse suite of VQA datasets, curate contrastive pairs according to multi-modal similarity, and generate rationales using VC-STaR. Consequently, we obtain a new visual reasoning dataset, VisCoR-55K, which is then used to boost the reasoning capability of various VLMs through supervised finetuning. Extensive experiments show that VC-STaR not only outperforms existing self-improving approaches but also surpasses models finetuned on the SoTA visual reasoning datasets, demonstrating that the inherent contrastive ability of VLMs can bootstrap their own visual reasoning. Project at: https://github.com/zhiyupan42/VC-STaR.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are expected to be capable of reasoning with commonsense knowledge as human beings. One example is that humans can reason where and when an image is taken based on their knowledge. This makes us wonder if, based on visual cues, Vision-Language Models that are pre-trained with large-scale image-text resources can achieve and even outperform human's capability in reasoning times and location. To address this question, we propose a two-stage \recognition\space and \reasoning\space probing task, applied to discriminative and generative VLMs to uncover whether VLMs can recognize times and location-relevant features and further reason about it. To facilitate the investigation, we introduce WikiTiLo, a well-curated image dataset compromising images with rich socio-cultural cues. In the extensive experimental studies, we find that although VLMs can effectively retain relevant features in visual encoders, they still fail to make perfect reasoning. We will release our dataset and codes to facilitate future studies.

Recent progress in multimodal reasoning has been driven largely by undisclosed datasets and proprietary data synthesis recipes, leaving open questions about how to systematically build large-scale, vision-centric reasoning datasets, particularly for tasks that go beyond visual math. In this work, we introduce a new reasoning data generation framework spanning diverse skills and levels of complexity with over 1M high-quality synthetic vision-centric questions. The dataset also includes preference data and instruction prompts supporting both offline and online RL. Our synthesis framework proceeds in two stages: (1) scale; and (2) complexity. Reasoning traces are then synthesized through a two-stage process that leverages VLMs and reasoning LLMs, producing CoT traces for VLMs that capture the richness and diverse cognitive behaviors found in frontier reasoning models. Remarkably, we show that finetuning Qwen2.5-VL-7B on our data outperforms all open-data baselines across all evaluated vision-centric benchmarks, and even surpasses strong closed-data models such as MiMo-VL-7B-RL on V* Bench, CV-Bench and MMStar-V. Perhaps most surprising, despite being entirely vision-centric, our data transfers positively to text-only reasoning (MMLU-Pro) and audio reasoning (MMAU), demonstrating its effectiveness. Similarly, despite not containing videos or embodied visual data, we observe notable gains when evaluating on a single-evidence embodied QA benchmark (NiEH). Finally, we use our data to analyze the entire VLM post-training pipeline. Our empirical analysis highlights that (i) SFT on high-quality data with non-linear reasoning traces is essential for effective online RL, (ii) staged offline RL matches online RL's performance while reducing compute demands, and (iii) careful SFT on high quality data can substantially improve out-of-domain, cross-modality transfer.

Abstract reasoning from minimal examples remains a core unsolved problem for frontier foundation models such as GPT-5 and Grok 4. These models still fail to infer structured transformation rules from a handful of examples, which is a key hallmark of human intelligence. The Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus for Artificial General Intelligence (ARC-AGI) provides a rigorous testbed for this capability, demanding conceptual rule induction and transfer to novel tasks. Most existing methods treat ARC-AGI as a purely textual reasoning task, overlooking the fact that humans rely heavily on visual abstraction when solving such puzzles. However, our pilot experiments reveal a paradox: naively rendering ARC-AGI grids as images degrades performance due to imprecise rule execution. This leads to our central hypothesis that vision and language possess complementary strengths across distinct reasoning stages: vision supports global pattern abstraction and verification, whereas language specializes in symbolic rule formulation and precise execution. Building on this insight, we introduce two synergistic strategies: (1) Vision-Language Synergy Reasoning (VLSR), which decomposes ARC-AGI into modality-aligned subtasks; and (2) Modality-Switch Self-Correction (MSSC), which leverages vision to verify text-based reasoning for intrinsic error correction. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach yields up to a 4.33% improvement over text-only baselines across diverse flagship models and multiple ARC-AGI tasks. Our findings suggest that unifying visual abstraction with linguistic reasoning is a crucial step toward achieving generalizable, human-like intelligence in future foundation models. Source code will be released soon.

While Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting enables sophisticated symbolic reasoning in LLMs, it remains confined to discrete text and cannot simulate the continuous, physics-governed dynamics of the real world. Recent video generation models have emerged as potential world simulators through Chain-of-Frames (CoF) reasoning -- materializing thought as frame-by-frame visual sequences, with each frame representing a physically-grounded reasoning step. Despite compelling demonstrations, a challenge persists: existing benchmarks, focusing on fidelity or alignment, do not assess CoF reasoning and thus cannot measure core cognitive abilities in multi-step planning, algorithmic logic, or abstract pattern extrapolation. This evaluation void prevents systematic understanding of model capabilities and principled guidance for improvement. We introduce Gen-ViRe (Generative Visual Reasoning Benchmark), a framework grounded in cognitive science and real-world AI applications, which decomposes CoF reasoning into six cognitive dimensions -- from perceptual logic to abstract planning -- and 24 subtasks. Through multi-source data curation, minimal prompting protocols, and hybrid VLM-assisted evaluation with detailed criteria, Gen-ViRe delivers the first quantitative assessment of video models as reasoners. Our experiments on SOTA systems reveal substantial discrepancies between impressive visual quality and actual reasoning depth, establishing baselines and diagnostic tools to advance genuine world simulators.

Reasoning is central to human intelligence, enabling structured problem-solving across diverse tasks. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have greatly enhanced their reasoning abilities in arithmetic, commonsense, and symbolic domains. However, effectively extending these capabilities into multimodal contexts-where models must integrate both visual and textual inputs-continues to be a significant challenge. Multimodal reasoning introduces complexities, such as handling conflicting information across modalities, which require models to adopt advanced interpretative strategies. Addressing these challenges involves not only sophisticated algorithms but also robust methodologies for evaluating reasoning accuracy and coherence. This paper offers a concise yet insightful overview of reasoning techniques in both textual and multimodal LLMs. Through a thorough and up-to-date comparison, we clearly formulate core reasoning challenges and opportunities, highlighting practical methods for post-training optimization and test-time inference. Our work provides valuable insights and guidance, bridging theoretical frameworks and practical implementations, and sets clear directions for future research.

Spatial reasoning is a key aspect of cognitive psychology and remains a major bottleneck for current vision-language models (VLMs). While extensive research has aimed to evaluate or improve VLMs' understanding of basic spatial relations, such as distinguishing left from right, near from far, and object counting, these tasks represent only the most fundamental level of spatial reasoning. In this work, we introduce OmniSpatial, a comprehensive and challenging benchmark for spatial reasoning, grounded in cognitive psychology. OmniSpatial covers four major categories: dynamic reasoning, complex spatial logic, spatial interaction, and perspective-taking, with 50 fine-grained subcategories. Through Internet data crawling and careful manual annotation, we construct over 1.5K question-answer pairs. Extensive experiments show that both open- and closed-source VLMs, as well as existing reasoning and spatial understanding models, exhibit significant limitations in comprehensive spatial understanding. We further analyze failure cases and propose potential directions for future research.

Current visual reasoning methods mainly focus on exploring specific reasoning modes. Although improvements can be achieved in particular domains, they struggle to develop general reasoning capabilities. Inspired by this, we propose a novel adaptive reasoning paradigm, Mixture-of-Visual-Thoughts (MoVT), which unifies different reasoning modes within a single model and guides it to select the appropriate mode based on context. To achieve this, we introduce AdaVaR, a two-stage Adaptive Visual Reasoning learning framework: different modes are unified and learned during the supervised cold-start stage, and the mode selection capability is induced via an RL process with a carefully designed AdaGRPO algorithm. Extensive experiments show that AdaVaR effectively guides the model to learn and differentiate multiple modes and perform context-adaptive mode selection, achieving consistent improvement across various scenarios, highlighting MoVT as an effective solution for building general visual reasoning models.

Learning general-purpose reasoning capabilities has long been a challenging problem in AI. Recent research in large language models (LLMs), such as DeepSeek-R1, has shown that reinforcement learning techniques like GRPO can enable pre-trained LLMs to develop reasoning capabilities using simple question-answer pairs. In this paper, we aim to train visual language models (VLMs) to perform reasoning on image data through reinforcement learning and visual question-answer pairs, without any explicit chain-of-thought (CoT) supervision. Our findings indicate that simply applying reinforcement learning to a VLM -- by prompting the model to produce a reasoning chain before providing an answer -- can lead the model to develop shortcuts from easy questions, thereby reducing its ability to generalize across unseen data distributions. We argue that the key to mitigating shortcut learning is to encourage the model to interpret images prior to reasoning. Therefore, we train the model to adhere to a caption-reason-answer output format: initially generating a detailed caption for an image, followed by constructing an extensive reasoning chain. When trained on 273K CoT-free visual question-answer pairs and using only reinforcement learning, our model, named Visionary-R1, outperforms strong multimodal models, such as GPT-4o, Claude3.5-Sonnet, and Gemini-1.5-Pro, on multiple visual reasoning benchmarks.

Complex reasoning problems often involve implicit spatial, geometric, and structural relationships that are not explicitly encoded in text. While recent reasoning models have achieved strong performance across many domains, purely text-based reasoning struggles to represent global structural constraints in complex settings. In this paper, we introduce FIGR, which integrates active visual thinking into multi-turn reasoning via end-to-end reinforcement learning. FIGR externalizes intermediate structural hypotheses by constructing visual representations during problem solving. By adaptively regulating when and how visual reasoning should be invoked, FIGR enables more stable and coherent reasoning over global structural properties that are difficult to capture from text alone. Experiments on challenging mathematical reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that FIGR outperforms strong text-only chain-of-thought baselines. In particular, FIGR improves the base model by 13.12% on AIME 2025 and 11.00% on BeyondAIME, highlighting the effectiveness of figure-guided multimodal reasoning in enhancing the stability and reliability of complex reasoning.

Large vision-language models (LVLMs) have witnessed significant progress on visual understanding tasks. However, they often prioritize language knowledge over image information on visual reasoning tasks, incurring performance degradation. To tackle this issue, we first identify the drawbacks of existing solutions (i.e., insufficient and irrelevant visual descriptions, and limited multi-modal capacities). We then decompose visual reasoning process into two stages: visual perception (i.e., eyesight) and textual reasoning (i.e., wisdom), and introduce a novel visual reasoning framework named ProReason. This framework features multi-run proactive perception and decoupled vision-reasoning capabilities. Briefly, given a multi-modal question, ProReason iterates proactive information collection and reasoning until the answer can be concluded with necessary and sufficient visual descriptions. Notably, the disassociation of capabilities allows seamless integration of existing large language models (LLMs) to compensate for the reasoning deficits of LVLMs. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that ProReason outperforms both existing multi-step reasoning frameworks and passive peer methods on a wide range of benchmarks for both open-source and closed-source models. In addition, with the assistance of LLMs, ProReason achieves a performance improvement of up to 15% on MMMU benchmark. Our insights into existing solutions and the decoupled perspective for feasible integration of LLMs illuminate future research on visual reasoning techniques, especially LLM-assisted ones.

Modern vision models have achieved remarkable success in benchmarks where local features provide critical information about the target. There is now a growing interest in solving tasks that require more global reasoning, where local features offer no significant information. These tasks are reminiscent of the connectivity tasks discussed by Minsky and Papert in 1969, which exposed the limitations of the perceptron model and contributed to the first AI winter. In this paper, we revisit such tasks by introducing four global visual benchmarks involving path findings and mazes. We show that: (1) although today's large vision models largely surpass the expressivity limitations of the early models, they still struggle with the learning efficiency; we put forward the "globality degree" notion to understand this limitation; (2) we then demonstrate that the picture changes and global reasoning becomes feasible with the introduction of "visual scratchpads"; similarly to the text scratchpads and chain-of-thoughts used in language models, visual scratchpads help break down global tasks into simpler ones; (3) we finally show that some scratchpads are better than others, in particular, "inductive scratchpads" that take steps relying on less information afford better out-of-distribution generalization and succeed for smaller model sizes.

Visual reasoning (VR), which is crucial in many fields for enabling human-like visual understanding, remains highly challenging. Recently, compositional visual reasoning approaches, which leverage the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs) with integrated tools to solve problems, have shown promise as more effective strategies than end-to-end VR methods. However, these approaches face limitations, as frozen LLMs lack tool awareness in VR, leading to performance bottlenecks. While leveraging LLMs for reasoning is widely used in other domains, they are not directly applicable to VR due to limited training data, imperfect tools that introduce errors and reduce data collection efficiency in VR, and challenging in fine-tuning on noisy workflows. To address these challenges, we propose DWIM: i) Discrepancy-aware training Workflow generation, which assesses tool usage and extracts more viable workflows for training; and ii) Instruct-Masking fine-tuning, which guides the model to only clone effective actions, enabling the generation of more practical solutions. Our experiments demonstrate that DWIM achieves state-of-the-art performance across various VR tasks, exhibiting strong generalization on multiple widely-used datasets.

Large multimodal models extend the impressive capabilities of large language models by integrating multimodal understanding abilities. However, it is not clear how they can emulate the general intelligence and reasoning ability of humans. As recognizing patterns and abstracting concepts are key to general intelligence, we introduce PuzzleVQA, a collection of puzzles based on abstract patterns. With this dataset, we evaluate large multimodal models with abstract patterns based on fundamental concepts, including colors, numbers, sizes, and shapes. Through our experiments on state-of-the-art large multimodal models, we find that they are not able to generalize well to simple abstract patterns. Notably, even GPT-4V cannot solve more than half of the puzzles. To diagnose the reasoning challenges in large multimodal models, we progressively guide the models with our ground truth reasoning explanations for visual perception, inductive reasoning, and deductive reasoning. Our systematic analysis finds that the main bottlenecks of GPT-4V are weaker visual perception and inductive reasoning abilities. Through this work, we hope to shed light on the limitations of large multimodal models and how they can better emulate human cognitive processes in the future (Our data and code will be released publicly at https://github.com/declare-lab/LLM-PuzzleTest).

Recent advancements in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have significantly enhanced cross-modal understanding and reasoning by incorporating Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning in the semantic space. Building upon this, recent studies extend the CoT mechanism to the visual modality, enabling models to integrate visual information during reasoning through external tools or explicit image generation. However, these methods remain dependent on explicit step-by-step reasoning, unstable perception-reasoning interaction and notable computational overhead. Inspired by human cognition, we posit that thinking unfolds not linearly but through the dynamic interleaving of reasoning and perception within the mind. Motivated by this perspective, we propose DMLR, a test-time Dynamic Multimodal Latent Reasoning framework that employs confidence-guided latent policy gradient optimization to refine latent think tokens for in-depth reasoning. Furthermore, a Dynamic Visual Injection Strategy is introduced, which retrieves the most relevant visual features at each latent think token and updates the set of best visual patches. The updated patches are then injected into latent think token to achieve dynamic visual-textual interleaving. Experiments across seven multimodal reasoning benchmarks and various model architectures demonstrate that DMLR significantly improves reasoning and perception performance while maintaining high inference efficiency.

Empowering Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) to deeply integrate image interaction with long-horizon reasoning capabilities remains a long-standing challenge in this field. Recent advances in vision-centric reasoning explore a promising "Thinking with Images" paradigm for LMMs, marking a shift from image-assisted reasoning to image-interactive thinking. While this milestone enables models to focus on fine-grained image regions, progress remains constrained by limited visual tool spaces and task-specific workflow designs. To bridge this gap, we present V-Thinker, a general-purpose multimodal reasoning assistant that enables interactive, vision-centric thinking through end-to-end reinforcement learning. V-Thinker comprises two key components: (1) a Data Evolution Flywheel that automatically synthesizes, evolves, and verifies interactive reasoning datasets across three dimensions-diversity, quality, and difficulty; and (2) a Visual Progressive Training Curriculum that first aligns perception via point-level supervision, then integrates interactive reasoning through a two-stage reinforcement learning framework. Furthermore, we introduce VTBench, an expert-verified benchmark targeting vision-centric interactive reasoning tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that V-Thinker consistently outperforms strong LMM-based baselines in both general and interactive reasoning scenarios, providing valuable insights for advancing image-interactive reasoning applications.

Recently, reasoning-based MLLMs have achieved a degree of success in generating long-form textual reasoning chains. However, they still struggle with complex tasks that necessitate dynamic and iterative focusing on and revisiting of visual regions to achieve precise grounding of textual reasoning in visual evidence. We introduce VLM-R^3 (Visual Language Model with Region Recognition and Reasoning), a framework that equips an MLLM with the ability to (i) decide when additional visual evidence is needed, (ii) determine where to ground within the image, and (iii) seamlessly weave the relevant sub-image content back into an interleaved chain-of-thought. The core of our method is Region-Conditioned Reinforcement Policy Optimization (R-GRPO), a training paradigm that rewards the model for selecting informative regions, formulating appropriate transformations (e.g.\ crop, zoom), and integrating the resulting visual context into subsequent reasoning steps. To bootstrap this policy, we compile a modest but carefully curated Visuo-Lingual Interleaved Rationale (VLIR) corpus that provides step-level supervision on region selection and textual justification. Extensive experiments on MathVista, ScienceQA, and other benchmarks show that VLM-R^3 sets a new state of the art in zero-shot and few-shot settings, with the largest gains appearing on questions demanding subtle spatial reasoning or fine-grained visual cue extraction.

Despite impressive progress in high-fidelity image synthesis, generative models still struggle with logic-intensive instruction following, exposing a persistent reasoning--execution gap. Meanwhile, closed-source systems (e.g., Nano Banana) have demonstrated strong reasoning-driven image generation, highlighting a substantial gap to current open-source models. We argue that closing this gap requires not merely better visual generators, but executable reasoning: decomposing high-level intents into grounded, verifiable plans that directly steer the generative process. To this end, we propose Unified Thinker, a task-agnostic reasoning architecture for general image generation, designed as a unified planning core that can plug into diverse generators and workflows. Unified Thinker decouples a dedicated Thinker from the image Generator, enabling modular upgrades of reasoning without retraining the entire generative model. We further introduce a two-stage training paradigm: we first build a structured planning interface for the Thinker, then apply reinforcement learning to ground its policy in pixel-level feedback, encouraging plans that optimize visual correctness over textual plausibility. Extensive experiments on text-to-image generation and image editing show that Unified Thinker substantially improves image reasoning and generation quality.

Reasoning goes beyond language; the real world requires reasoning about space, time, affordances, and much more that words alone cannot convey. Existing multimodal models exploring the potential of reasoning with images are brittle and do not scale. They rely on calling specialist tools, costly generation of images, or handcrafted reasoning data to switch between text and image thoughts. Instead, we offer a simpler alternative -- Mull-Tokens -- modality-agnostic latent tokens pre-trained to hold intermediate information in either image or text modalities to let the model think free-form towards the correct answer. We investigate best practices to train Mull-Tokens inspired by latent reasoning frameworks. We first train Mull-Tokens using supervision from interleaved text-image traces, and then fine-tune without any supervision by only using the final answers. Across four challenging spatial reasoning benchmarks involving tasks such as solving puzzles and taking different perspectives, we demonstrate that Mull-Tokens improve upon several baselines utilizing text-only reasoning or interleaved image-text reasoning, achieving a +3% average improvement and up to +16% on a puzzle solving reasoning-heavy split compared to our strongest baseline. Adding to conversations around challenges in grounding textual and visual reasoning, Mull-Tokens offers a simple solution to abstractly think in multiple modalities.

Models capable of "thinking with images" by dynamically grounding their reasoning in visual evidence represent a major leap in multimodal AI. However, replicating and advancing this ability is non-trivial, with current methods often trapped between the instability of end-to-end reinforcement learning (RL) and the rigidity of supervised fine-tuning (SFT). This leads to models that either struggle to learn or lack the cognitive flexibility required for complex, real-world scenes. To navigate this dilemma, we introduce GRiP (Guided Reasoning and Perception), a novel two-stage training framework that cultivates robust and flexible visual grounded reasoning by explicitly guiding the model's perceptual focus and logical pathways. GRiP's core lies in its cognitive-enhanced RL stage, which features two key innovations: (1) a Salience-Weighted IoU Reward that incentivizes the model to prioritize the localization of mission-critical objects over trivial distractors, and (2) a Multi-Heuristic Reward that encourages cognitive flexibility by rewarding diverse yet logically valid reasoning pathways. Initialized from the Qwen2.5-VL-7B model, GRiP demonstrates significant performance gains across multiple challenging benchmarks. It achieves state-of-the-art results among open-source models on the highly challenging TreeBench and V* Bench, proving its effectiveness in complex visual reasoning. Our work demonstrates that moving beyond simplistic rewards and instead guiding models with cognitively-inspired signals for what to see and how to think is crucial for unlocking the next level of multimodal intelligence. The code will be made publicly available.

We explore multi-step reasoning in vision-language models (VLMs). The problem is challenging, as reasoning data consisting of multiple steps of visual and language processing are barely available. To overcome the challenge, we first introduce a least-to-most visual reasoning paradigm, which interleaves steps of decomposing a question into sub-questions and invoking external tools for resolving sub-questions. Based on the paradigm, we further propose a novel data synthesis approach that can automatically create questions and multi-step reasoning paths for an image in a bottom-up manner. Our approach divides the complex synthesis task into a few simple sub-tasks, and (almost entirely) relies on open-sourced models to accomplish the sub-tasks. Therefore, the entire synthesis process is reproducible and cost-efficient, and the synthesized data is quality guaranteed. With the approach, we construct 50k visual reasoning examples. Then, we develop a visual reasoner through supervised fine-tuning, which is capable of generally enhancing the reasoning abilities of a wide range of existing VLMs in a plug-and-play fashion. Extensive experiments indicate that the visual reasoner can consistently and significantly improve four VLMs on four VQA benchmarks. Our code and dataset are available at https://github.com/steven-ccq/VisualReasoner.

Advancing machine visual reasoning requires a deeper understanding of how Vision-Language Models (VLMs) process and interpret complex visual patterns. This work introduces a novel, cognitively-inspired evaluation framework to systematically analyze VLM reasoning on natural image-based Bongard Problems. We propose three structured paradigms -- Direct Visual Rule Learning, Deductive Rule Learning, and Componential Analysis -- designed to progressively enforce step-wise reasoning and disentangle the interplay between perception and reasoning. Our evaluation shows that advanced, closed-source VLMs (GPT-4o and Gemini 2.0) achieve near-superhuman performance, particularly when provided with high-quality image descriptions, while open-source models exhibit a significant performance bottleneck due to deficiencies in perception. An ablation study further confirms that perception, rather than reasoning, is the primary limiting factor, as open-source models apply extracted rules effectively when given accurate descriptions. These findings underscore the critical role of robust multimodal perception in enhancing generalizable visual reasoning and highlight the importance of structured, step-wise reasoning paradigms for advancing machine intelligence.

Most state-of-the-art Visual-Language Models (VLMs) are seemingly limited by the linear separabilty of their visual embeddings on abstract reasoning tasks. This work investigates this "linear reasoning bottleneck" by introducing the Linear Separability Ceiling (LSC), the performance of a simple linear classifier on a VLM's visual embeddings. We find this bottleneck is widespread and stems not from poor perception, but from failures in the language model's reasoning pathways. We demonstrate this is a solvable alignment issue. The required intervention, however, is task-dependent: activating existing pathways suffices for semantic concepts, while complex relational reasoning requires adapting core model weights. Using postfix tuning as a methodological control, we find strong evidence for powerful, dormant reasoning pathways within VLMs. However, for complex relational tasks requiring deeper adaptation, explicitly improving representation quality causes the model to fail on new prompt formats despite its embeddings remaining well separated. Ultimately, this work provides a new lens for VLM analysis, showing that robust reasoning is a matter of targeted alignment, not simply improved representation learning.

Large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have shown strong capabilities in multimodal understanding and reasoning, yet they are primarily constrained by text-based reasoning processes. However, achieving seamless integration of visual and textual reasoning which mirrors human cognitive processes remains a significant challenge. In particular, effectively incorporating advanced visual input processing into reasoning mechanisms is still an open question. Thus, in this paper, we explore the interleaved multimodal reasoning paradigm and introduce DeepEyes, a model with "thinking with images" capabilities incentivized through end-to-end reinforcement learning without the need for cold-start SFT. Notably, this ability emerges natively within the model itself, leveraging its inherent grounding ability as a tool instead of depending on separate specialized models. Specifically, we propose a tool-use-oriented data selection mechanism and a reward strategy to encourage successful tool-assisted reasoning trajectories. DeepEyes achieves significant performance gains on fine-grained perception and reasoning benchmarks and also demonstrates improvement in grounding, hallucination, and mathematical reasoning tasks. Interestingly, we observe the distinct evolution of tool-calling behavior from initial exploration to efficient and accurate exploitation, and diverse thinking patterns that closely mirror human visual reasoning processes. Code is available at https://github.com/Visual-Agent/DeepEyes.

The remarkable performance of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) has unequivocally demonstrated their proficient understanding capabilities in handling a wide array of visual tasks. Nevertheless, the opaque nature of their black-box reasoning processes persists as an enigma, rendering them uninterpretable and struggling with hallucination. Their ability to execute intricate compositional reasoning tasks is also constrained, culminating in a stagnation of learning progression for these models. In this work, we introduce Fact, a novel paradigm designed to generate multimodal rationales that are faithful, concise, and transferable for teaching MLLMs. This paradigm utilizes verifiable visual programming to generate executable code guaranteeing faithfulness and precision. Subsequently, through a series of operations including pruning, merging, and bridging, the rationale enhances its conciseness. Furthermore, we filter rationales that can be transferred to end-to-end paradigms from programming paradigms to guarantee transferability. Empirical evidence from experiments demonstrates the superiority of our method across models of varying parameter sizes, significantly enhancing their compositional reasoning and generalization ability. Our approach also reduces hallucinations owing to its high correlation between images and text.

Theory-of-Mind (ToM), the ability to infer others' perceptions and mental states, is fundamental to human interaction but remains a challenging task for Large Language Models (LLMs). While existing ToM reasoning methods show promise with reasoning via perceptual perspective-taking, they often rely excessively on LLMs, reducing their efficiency and limiting their applicability to high-order ToM reasoning, which requires multi-hop reasoning about characters' beliefs. To address these issues, we present EnigmaToM, a novel neuro-symbolic framework that enhances ToM reasoning by integrating a Neural Knowledge Base of entity states (Enigma) for (1) a psychology-inspired iterative masking mechanism that facilitates accurate perspective-taking and (2) knowledge injection that elicits key entity information. Enigma generates structured representations of entity states, which construct spatial scene graphs -- leveraging spatial information as an inductive bias -- for belief tracking of various ToM orders and enhancing events with fine-grained entity state details. Experimental results on multiple benchmarks, including ToMi, HiToM, and FANToM, show that EnigmaToM significantly improves ToM reasoning across LLMs of varying sizes, particularly excelling in high-order reasoning scenarios.

Recent advances in large multimodal models suggest that explicit reasoning mechanisms play a critical role in improving model reliability, interpretability, and cross-modal alignment. While such reasoning-centric approaches have been proven effective in language and vision tasks, their extension to 3D remains underdeveloped. CoRe3D introduces a unified 3D understanding and generation reasoning framework that jointly operates over semantic and spatial abstractions, enabling high-level intent inferred from language to directly guide low-level 3D content formation. Central to this design is a spatially grounded reasoning representation that decomposes 3D latent space into localized regions, allowing the model to reason over geometry in a compositional and procedural manner. By tightly coupling semantic chain-of-thought inference with structured spatial reasoning, CoRe3D produces 3D outputs that exhibit strong local consistency and faithful alignment with linguistic descriptions.

MLLMs have been successfully applied to multimodal embedding tasks, yet their generative reasoning capabilities remain underutilized. Directly incorporating chain-of-thought reasoning into embedding learning introduces two fundamental challenges. First, structural misalignment between instance-level reasoning and pairwise contrastive supervision may lead to shortcut behavior, where the model merely learns the superficial format of reasoning. Second, reasoning is not universally beneficial for embedding tasks. Enforcing reasoning for all inputs may introduce unnecessary computation and latency, and can even obscure salient semantic signals for simple cases. To address these issues, we propose MMEmb-R1, an adaptive reasoning-based multimodal embedding framework. We formulate reasoning as a latent variable and introduce pair-aware reasoning selection that employs counterfactual intervention to identify reasoning paths beneficial for query-target alignment. Furthermore, we adopt reinforcement learning to selectively invoke reasoning only when necessary. Experiments on the MMEB-V2 benchmark demonstrate that our model achieves a score of 71.2 with only 4B parameters, establishing a new state-of-the-art while significantly reducing reasoning overhead and inference latency.

Visual planning represents a crucial facet of human intelligence, especially in tasks that require complex spatial reasoning and navigation. Yet, in machine learning, this inherently visual problem is often tackled through a verbal-centric lens. While recent research demonstrates the promise of fully visual approaches, they suffer from significant computational inefficiency due to the step-by-step planning-by-generation paradigm. In this work, we present EAR, an editing-as-reasoning paradigm that reformulates visual planning as a single-step image transformation. To isolate intrinsic reasoning from visual recognition, we employ abstract puzzles as probing tasks and introduce AMAZE, a procedurally generated dataset that features the classical Maze and Queen problems, covering distinct, complementary forms of visual planning. The abstract nature of AMAZE also facilitates automatic evaluation of autoregressive and diffusion-based models in terms of both pixel-wise fidelity and logical validity. We assess leading proprietary and open-source editing models. The results show that they all struggle in the zero-shot setting, finetuning on basic scales enables remarkable generalization to larger in-domain scales and out-of-domain scales and geometries. However, our best model that runs on high-end hardware fails to match the zero-shot efficiency of human solvers, highlighting a persistent gap in neural visual reasoning.

Although great progress has been made in 3D visual grounding, current models still rely on explicit textual descriptions for grounding and lack the ability to reason human intentions from implicit instructions. We propose a new task called 3D reasoning grounding and introduce a new benchmark ScanReason which provides over 10K question-answer-location pairs from five reasoning types that require the synerization of reasoning and grounding. We further design our approach, ReGround3D, composed of the visual-centric reasoning module empowered by Multi-modal Large Language Model (MLLM) and the 3D grounding module to obtain accurate object locations by looking back to the enhanced geometry and fine-grained details from the 3D scenes. A chain-of-grounding mechanism is proposed to further boost the performance with interleaved reasoning and grounding steps during inference. Extensive experiments on the proposed benchmark validate the effectiveness of our proposed approach.

In our work, we explore the synergistic capabilities of pre-trained vision-and-language models (VLMs) and large language models (LLMs) for visual commonsense reasoning (VCR). We categorize the problem of VCR into visual commonsense understanding (VCU) and visual commonsense inference (VCI). For VCU, which involves perceiving the literal visual content, pre-trained VLMs exhibit strong cross-dataset generalization. On the other hand, in VCI, where the goal is to infer conclusions beyond image content, VLMs face difficulties. We find that a baseline where VLMs provide perception results (image captions) to LLMs leads to improved performance on VCI. However, we identify a challenge with VLMs' passive perception, which often misses crucial context information, leading to incorrect or uncertain reasoning by LLMs. To mitigate this issue, we suggest a collaborative approach where LLMs, when uncertain about their reasoning, actively direct VLMs to concentrate on and gather relevant visual elements to support potential commonsense inferences. In our method, named ViCor, pre-trained LLMs serve as problem classifiers to analyze the problem category, VLM commanders to leverage VLMs differently based on the problem classification, and visual commonsense reasoners to answer the question. VLMs will perform visual recognition and understanding. We evaluate our framework on two VCR benchmark datasets and outperform all other methods that do not require in-domain supervised fine-tuning.

We investigate the ability of Vision Language Models (VLMs) to perform visual perspective taking using a novel set of visual tasks inspired by established human tests. Our approach leverages carefully controlled scenes, in which a single humanoid minifigure is paired with a single object. By systematically varying spatial configurations - such as object position relative to the humanoid minifigure and the humanoid minifigure's orientation - and using both bird's-eye and surface-level views, we created 144 unique visual tasks. Each visual task is paired with a series of 7 diagnostic questions designed to assess three levels of visual cognition: scene understanding, spatial reasoning, and visual perspective taking. Our evaluation of several state-of-the-art models, including GPT-4-Turbo, GPT-4o, Llama-3.2-11B-Vision-Instruct, and variants of Claude Sonnet, reveals that while they excel in scene understanding, the performance declines significantly on spatial reasoning and further deteriorates on perspective-taking. Our analysis suggests a gap between surface-level object recognition and the deeper spatial and perspective reasoning required for complex visual tasks, pointing to the need for integrating explicit geometric representations and tailored training protocols in future VLM development.

Visual Question Answering (VQA) methods have made incredible progress, but suffer from a failure to generalize. This is visible in the fact that they are vulnerable to learning coincidental correlations in the data rather than deeper relations between image content and ideas expressed in language. We present a dataset that takes a step towards addressing this problem in that it contains questions expressed in two languages, and an evaluation process that co-opts a well understood image-based metric to reflect the method's ability to reason. Measuring reasoning directly encourages generalization by penalizing answers that are coincidentally correct. The dataset reflects the scene-text version of the VQA problem, and the reasoning evaluation can be seen as a text-based version of a referring expression challenge. Experiments and analysis are provided that show the value of the dataset.

Visual reasoning is challenging, requiring both precise object grounding and understanding complex spatial relationships. Existing methods fall into two camps: language-only chain-of-thought approaches, which demand large-scale (image, query, answer) supervision, and program-synthesis approaches which use pre-trained models and avoid training, but suffer from flawed logic and erroneous grounding. We propose an annotation-free training framework that improves both reasoning and grounding. Our framework uses AI-powered verifiers: an LLM verifier refines LLM reasoning via reinforcement learning, while a VLM verifier strengthens visual grounding through automated hard-negative mining, eliminating the need for ground truth labels. This design combines the strengths of modern AI systems: advanced language-only reasoning models for decomposing spatial queries into simpler subtasks, and strong vision specialist models improved via performant VLM critics. We evaluate our approach across diverse spatial reasoning tasks, and show that our method improves visual reasoning and surpasses open-source and proprietary models, while with our improved visual grounding model we further outperform recent text-only visual reasoning methods. Project webpage: https://glab-caltech.github.io/valor/

Text-to-image (T2I) generation has achieved remarkable progress, yet existing methods often lack the ability to dynamically reason and refine during generation--a hallmark of human creativity. Current reasoning-augmented paradigms most rely on explicit thought processes, where intermediate reasoning is decoded into discrete text at fixed steps with frequent image decoding and re-encoding, leading to inefficiencies, information loss, and cognitive mismatches. To bridge this gap, we introduce LatentMorph, a novel framework that seamlessly integrates implicit latent reasoning into the T2I generation process. At its core, LatentMorph introduces four lightweight components: (i) a condenser for summarizing intermediate generation states into compact visual memory, (ii) a translator for converting latent thoughts into actionable guidance, (iii) a shaper for dynamically steering next image token predictions, and (iv) an RL-trained invoker for adaptively determining when to invoke reasoning. By performing reasoning entirely in continuous latent spaces, LatentMorph avoids the bottlenecks of explicit reasoning and enables more adaptive self-refinement. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LatentMorph (I) enhances the base model Janus-Pro by 16% on GenEval and 25% on T2I-CompBench; (II) outperforms explicit paradigms (e.g., TwiG) by 15% and 11% on abstract reasoning tasks like WISE and IPV-Txt, (III) while reducing inference time by 44% and token consumption by 51%; and (IV) exhibits 71% cognitive alignment with human intuition on reasoning invocation.

As Vision-Language Models (VLMs) grow in sophistication, their ability to perform reasoning is coming under increasing supervision. While they excel at many tasks, their grasp of fundamental scientific principles, such as physics, remains an underexplored frontier. To reflect the advancements in these capabilities, we introduce a novel and accessible framework designed to rigorously evaluate VLMs on their understanding of 2D physics. Our framework features a pragmatic scenario generator that creates a diverse testbed of over 400 problems across four core domains: Projectile Motion, Collision Dynamics, Mechanics, and Fluid Dynamics. Through comprehensive evaluation of four state-of-the-art VLMs, we demonstrate a strong correlation between model scale and reasoning ability, with our top-performing model, Qwen2.5-VL-7B, achieving an overall score of 0.815. We find that while models excel at formulaic problems, they struggle significantly with domains requiring abstract spatial reasoning. By designing this framework, we aim to democratize the study of scientific reasoning in VLMs and foster deeper insights into their capabilities and limitations.

This work revisits the dominant supervised fine-tuning (SFT) then reinforcement learning (RL) paradigm for training Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs), and reveals a key finding: SFT can significantly undermine subsequent RL by inducing ``pseudo reasoning paths'' imitated from expert models. While these paths may resemble the native reasoning paths of RL models, they often involve prolonged, hesitant, less informative steps, and incorrect reasoning. To systematically study this effect, we introduce VLAA-Thinking, a new multimodal dataset designed to support reasoning in LVLMs. Constructed via a six-step pipeline involving captioning, reasoning distillation, answer rewrite and verification, VLAA-Thinking comprises high-quality, step-by-step visual reasoning traces for SFT, along with a more challenging RL split from the same data source. Using this dataset, we conduct extensive experiments comparing SFT, RL and their combinations. Results show that while SFT helps models learn reasoning formats, it often locks aligned models into imitative, rigid reasoning modes that impede further learning. In contrast, building on the Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) with a novel mixed reward module integrating both perception and cognition signals, our RL approach fosters more genuine, adaptive reasoning behavior. Notably, our model VLAA-Thinker, based on Qwen2.5VL 3B, achieves top-1 performance on Open LMM Reasoning Leaderboard (https://huggingface.co/spaces/opencompass/Open_LMM_Reasoning_Leaderboard) among 4B scale LVLMs, surpassing the previous state-of-the-art by 1.8%. We hope our findings provide valuable insights in developing reasoning-capable LVLMs and can inform future research in this area.

We introduce PerceptionComp, a manually annotated benchmark for complex, long-horizon, perception-centric video reasoning. PerceptionComp is designed so that no single moment is sufficient: answering each question requires multiple temporally separated pieces of visual evidence and compositional constraints under conjunctive and sequential logic, spanning perceptual subtasks such as objects, attributes, relations, locations, actions, and events, and requiring skills including semantic recognition, visual correspondence, temporal reasoning, and spatial reasoning. The benchmark contains 1,114 highly complex questions on 279 videos from diverse domains including city walk tours, indoor villa tours, video games, and extreme outdoor sports, with 100% manual annotation. Human studies show that PerceptionComp requires substantial test-time thinking and repeated perception steps: participants take much longer than on prior benchmarks, and accuracy drops to near chance (18.97%) when rewatching is disallowed. State-of-the-art MLLMs also perform substantially worse on PerceptionComp than on existing benchmarks: the best model in our evaluation, Gemini-3-Flash, reaches only 45.96% accuracy in the five-choice setting, while open-source models remain below 40%. These results suggest that perception-centric long-horizon video reasoning remains a major bottleneck, and we hope PerceptionComp will help drive progress in perceptual reasoning.

Visual reasoning, the capability to interpret visual input in response to implicit text query through multi-step reasoning, remains a challenge for deep learning models due to the lack of relevant benchmarks. Previous work in visual reasoning has primarily focused on reasoning segmentation, where models aim to segment objects based on implicit text queries. This paper introduces reasoning visual tasks (RVTs), a unified formulation that extends beyond traditional video reasoning segmentation to a diverse family of visual language reasoning problems, which can therefore accommodate multiple output formats including bounding boxes, natural language descriptions, and question-answer pairs. Correspondingly, we identify the limitations in current benchmark construction methods that rely solely on large language models (LLMs), which inadequately capture complex spatial-temporal relationships and multi-step reasoning chains in video due to their reliance on token representation, resulting in benchmarks with artificially limited reasoning complexity. To address this limitation, we propose a novel automated RVT benchmark construction pipeline that leverages digital twin (DT) representations as structured intermediaries between perception and the generation of implicit text queries. Based on this method, we construct RVTBench, a RVT benchmark containing 3,896 queries of over 1.2 million tokens across four types of RVT (segmentation, grounding, VQA and summary), three reasoning categories (semantic, spatial, and temporal), and four increasing difficulty levels, derived from 200 video sequences. Finally, we propose RVTagent, an agent framework for RVT that allows for zero-shot generalization across various types of RVT without task-specific fine-tuning.

While Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have made significant progress, they remain largely text-centric, relying on language as their core reasoning modality. As a result, they are limited in their ability to handle reasoning tasks that are predominantly visual. Recent approaches have sought to address this by supervising intermediate visual steps with helper images, depth maps, or image crops. However, these strategies impose restrictive priors on what "useful" visual abstractions look like, add heavy annotation costs, and struggle to generalize across tasks. To address this critical limitation, we propose a task-agnostic mechanism that trains LMMs to discover and use visual reasoning tokens without explicit supervision. These tokens attend globally and re-encode the image in a task-adaptive way, enabling the model to extract relevant visual information without hand-crafted supervision. Our approach outperforms direct fine-tuning and achieves state-of-the-art results on a diverse range of vision-centric tasks -- including those where intermediate abstractions are hard to specify -- while also generalizing to multi-task instruction tuning.

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning has been highly successful in solving complex tasks in natural language processing, and recent multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have extended this paradigm to video reasoning. However, these models typically build on lengthy reasoning chains and large numbers of input visual tokens. Motivated by empirical observations from our benchmark study, we hypothesize that concise reasoning combined with a reduced set of visual tokens can be sufficient for effective video reasoning. To evaluate this hypothesis, we design and validate an efficient post-training and inference framework that enhances a video MLLM's reasoning capability. Our framework enables models to operate on compressed visual tokens and generate brief reasoning traces prior to answering. The resulting models achieve substantially improved inference efficiency, deliver competitive performance across diverse benchmarks, and avoid reliance on manual CoT annotations or supervised fine-tuning. Collectively, our results suggest that long, human-like CoT reasoning may not be necessary for general video reasoning, and that concise reasoning can be both effective and efficient. Our code will be released at https://github.com/LaVi-Lab/Rethink_CoT_Video.

Compositional visual reasoning has emerged as a key research frontier in multimodal AI, aiming to endow machines with the human-like ability to decompose visual scenes, ground intermediate concepts, and perform multi-step logical inference. While early surveys focus on monolithic vision-language models or general multimodal reasoning, a dedicated synthesis of the rapidly expanding compositional visual reasoning literature is still missing. We fill this gap with a comprehensive survey spanning 2023 to 2025 that systematically reviews 260+ papers from top venues (CVPR, ICCV, NeurIPS, ICML, ACL, etc.). We first formalize core definitions and describe why compositional approaches offer advantages in cognitive alignment, semantic fidelity, robustness, interpretability, and data efficiency. Next, we trace a five-stage paradigm shift: from prompt-enhanced language-centric pipelines, through tool-enhanced LLMs and tool-enhanced VLMs, to recently minted chain-of-thought reasoning and unified agentic VLMs, highlighting their architectural designs, strengths, and limitations. We then catalog 60+ benchmarks and corresponding metrics that probe compositional visual reasoning along dimensions such as grounding accuracy, chain-of-thought faithfulness, and high-resolution perception. Drawing on these analyses, we distill key insights, identify open challenges (e.g., limitations of LLM-based reasoning, hallucination, a bias toward deductive reasoning, scalable supervision, tool integration, and benchmark limitations), and outline future directions, including world-model integration, human-AI collaborative reasoning, and richer evaluation protocols. By offering a unified taxonomy, historical roadmap, and critical outlook, this survey aims to serve as a foundational reference and inspire the next generation of compositional visual reasoning research.

Visual reasoning is a core component of human intelligence and a critical capability for advanced multimodal models. Yet current reasoning evaluations of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) often rely on text descriptions and allow language-based reasoning shortcuts, failing to measure genuine vision-centric reasoning. To address this, we introduce VisuLogic: a benchmark of 1,000 human-verified problems across six categories (e.g., quantitative shifts, spatial relations, attribute comparisons). These various types of questions can be evaluated to assess the visual reasoning capabilities of MLLMs from multiple perspectives. We evaluate leading MLLMs on this benchmark and analyze their results to identify common failure modes. Most models score below 30% accuracy-only slightly above the 25% random baseline and far below the 51.4% achieved by humans-revealing significant gaps in visual reasoning. Furthermore, we provide a supplementary training dataset and a reinforcement-learning baseline to support further progress.

Large vision-language models have achieved remarkable progress in visual reasoning, yet most existing systems rely on single-step or text-only reasoning, limiting their ability to iteratively refine understanding across multiple visual contexts. To address this limitation, we introduce a new multi-round visual reasoning benchmark with training and test sets spanning both detection and segmentation tasks, enabling systematic evaluation under iterative reasoning scenarios. We further propose RegionReasoner, a reinforcement learning framework that enforces grounded reasoning by requiring each reasoning trace to explicitly cite the corresponding reference bounding boxes, while maintaining semantic coherence via a global-local consistency reward. This reward extracts key objects and nouns from both global scene captions and region-level captions, aligning them with the reasoning trace to ensure consistency across reasoning steps. RegionReasoner is optimized with structured rewards combining grounding fidelity and global-local semantic alignment. Experiments on detection and segmentation tasks show that RegionReasoner-7B, together with our newly introduced benchmark RegionDial-Bench, considerably improves multi-round reasoning accuracy, spatial grounding precision, and global-local consistency, establishing a strong baseline for this emerging research direction.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved notable gains in various tasks by incorporating Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning in language spaces. Recent work extends this direction by leveraging external tools for visual editing, thereby enhancing the visual signal along the reasoning trajectories. Nevertheless, these approaches remain fundamentally constrained: reasoning is still confined to the language space, with visual information treated as static preconditions. We introduce Latent Visual Reasoning (LVR), a new paradigm that enables autoregressive reasoning directly in the visual embedding space. A visual encoder first projects images into visual tokens within a joint semantic space shared with the language model. The language model is then trained to generate latent states that reconstruct key visual tokens critical for answering the query, constituting the process of latent visual reasoning. By interleaving LVR with standard text generation, our model achieves substantial gains on perception-intensive visual question answering tasks. In addition, we adapt the GRPO algorithm to conduct reinforcement learning on latent reasoning, further balancing LVR and textual generation. We show that LVR substantially improves fine-grained visual understanding and perception, achieving 71.67% on MMVP compared to 66.67% with Qwen2.5-VL. Code base and model weights will be released later.

Though recent advances in vision-language models (VLMs) have achieved remarkable progress across a wide range of multimodal tasks, understanding 3D spatial relationships from limited views remains a significant challenge. Previous reasoning methods typically rely on pure text (e.g., topological cognitive maps) or on 2D visual cues. However, their limited representational capacity hinders performance in specific tasks that require 3D spatial imagination. To address this limitation, we propose 3DThinker, a framework that can effectively exploits the rich geometric information embedded within images while reasoning, like humans do. Our framework is the first to enable 3D mentaling during reasoning without any 3D prior input, and it does not rely on explicitly labeled 3D data for training. Specifically, our training consists of two stages. First, we perform supervised training to align the 3D latent generated by VLM while reasoning with that of a 3D foundation model (e.g., VGGT). Then, we optimize the entire reasoning trajectory solely based on outcome signals, thereby refining the underlying 3D mentaling. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks show that 3DThinker consistently outperforms strong baselines and offers a new perspective toward unifying 3D representations into multimodal reasoning. Our code will be available at https://github.com/zhangquanchen/3DThinker.