Mind's Eye benchmark shows top multimodal LLMs score below 50% on visual abstraction, relation, and transformation tasks while humans reach 80%.
GRIT: Teaching MLLMs to Think with Images
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Pith papers citing it
abstract
Recent studies have demonstrated the efficacy of using Reinforcement Learning (RL) in building reasoning models that articulate chains of thoughts prior to producing final answers. However, despite ongoing advances that aim at enabling reasoning for vision-language tasks, existing open-source visual reasoning models typically generate reasoning content with pure natural language, lacking explicit integration of visual information. This limits their ability to produce clearly articulated and visually grounded reasoning chains. To this end, we propose Grounded Reasoning with Images and Texts (GRIT), a novel method for training MLLMs to think with images. GRIT introduces a grounded reasoning paradigm, in which models generate reasoning chains that interleave natural language and explicit bounding box coordinates. These coordinates point to regions of the input image that the model consults during its reasoning process. Additionally, GRIT is equipped with a reinforcement learning approach, GRPO-GR, built upon the GRPO algorithm. GRPO-GR employs robust rewards focused on the final answer accuracy and format of the grounded reasoning output, which eliminates the need for data with reasoning chain annotations or explicit bounding box labels. As a result, GRIT achieves exceptional data efficiency, requiring as few as 20 image-question-answer triplets from existing datasets. Comprehensive evaluations demonstrate that GRIT effectively trains MLLMs to produce coherent and visually grounded reasoning chains, showing a successful unification of reasoning and grounding abilities.
years
2026 6verdicts
UNVERDICTED 6representative citing papers
Perception Programs rewrite dense visual tool outputs into language-native summaries, boosting MLLM accuracy by 15-45% absolute on BLINK perception tasks and setting new state-of-the-art results.
SciTikZer-8B uses a new dataset, benchmark, and dual self-consistency RL to generate TikZ code for scientific graphics, outperforming much larger models like Gemini-2.5-Pro.
An RL-based questioner agent adaptively generates queries to discover novel failure modes in VLMs without human intervention.
CharTool equips MLLMs with cropping and code tools plus agentic RL on DuoChart data to raise chart-reasoning accuracy by up to 9.78 percent on benchmarks.
TTSP resolves the Grounding Paradox by treating perception as a scalable test-time process that generates, filters, and iteratively refines multiple visual exploration traces, outperforming baselines on high-resolution and multimodal reasoning tasks.
citing papers explorer
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Mind's Eye: A Benchmark of Visual Abstraction, Transformation and Composition for Multimodal LLMs
Mind's Eye benchmark shows top multimodal LLMs score below 50% on visual abstraction, relation, and transformation tasks while humans reach 80%.
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Don't Show Pixels, Show Cues: Unlocking Visual Tool Reasoning in Language Models via Perception Programs
Perception Programs rewrite dense visual tool outputs into language-native summaries, boosting MLLM accuracy by 15-45% absolute on BLINK perception tasks and setting new state-of-the-art results.
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Scientific Graphics Program Synthesis via Dual Self-Consistency Reinforcement Learning
SciTikZer-8B uses a new dataset, benchmark, and dual self-consistency RL to generate TikZ code for scientific graphics, outperforming much larger models like Gemini-2.5-Pro.
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Discovering Failure Modes in Vision-Language Models using RL
An RL-based questioner agent adaptively generates queries to discover novel failure modes in VLMs without human intervention.
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CharTool: Tool-Integrated Visual Reasoning for Chart Understanding
CharTool equips MLLMs with cropping and code tools plus agentic RL on DuoChart data to raise chart-reasoning accuracy by up to 9.78 percent on benchmarks.
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Test-time Scaling over Perception: Resolving the Grounding Paradox in Thinking with Images
TTSP resolves the Grounding Paradox by treating perception as a scalable test-time process that generates, filters, and iteratively refines multiple visual exploration traces, outperforming baselines on high-resolution and multimodal reasoning tasks.