S1-VL combines structured scientific reasoning with iterative image manipulation via code execution to reach state-of-the-art results on visual and scientific reasoning benchmarks.
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Thinking with Images for Multimodal Reasoning: Foundations, Methods, and Future Frontiers
Canonical reference. 91% of citing Pith papers cite this work as background.
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Pith papers citing it
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91% of classified citations
abstract
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.
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representative citing papers
DeepLatent introduces a parallel latent visual reasoning framework with learnable 2D tokens and continuous RL, trained via distillation then RL, plus a new 180K dataset, claiming SOTA benchmark results.
StemBind benchmark diagnoses MLLM failures in abstract visual reasoning by separating perception, rule induction, and answer selection on shared stems, finding a persistent rule-to-instance binding gap even when perception and rule are correct.
LatentOmni proposes a latent-space cross-modal reasoning framework that uses feature-level supervision and Omni-Sync Position Embedding to align and synchronize audio-visual latents, supported by a new 35K interleaved reasoning dataset and showing gains over text CoT baselines.
Proposes Spatial Narrative Score (SNS) evaluation for VLMs' camera motion understanding and introduces CaMo model achieving consistent performance on SNS and direct QA.
Proposes an equation-anchored tool-use method for MLLMs that writes the pinhole back-projection equation in Chain-of-Thought and substitutes retrieved camera intrinsics and depths to achieve robustness in 3D object detection and visual grounding under rescaled intrinsics.
GeoVista introduces a planning-driven active perception framework with global exploration plans, branch-wise local inspection, and explicit evidence tracking to achieve state-of-the-art results on ultra-high-resolution remote sensing benchmarks.
UniVLR unifies textual and visual reasoning in multimodal LLMs by compressing reasoning traces and auxiliary images into visual latent tokens for direct inference without interleaved text CoT.
CollabVR improves video reasoning performance by coupling vision-language models and video generation models in a closed-loop step-level collaboration that detects and repairs generation failures.
Pest-Thinker is a reinforcement learning framework that improves MLLMs' expert-level reasoning on pest morphology via synthesized CoT trajectories, GRPO optimization, and an LLM-judged feature reward on new benchmarks QFSD and AgriInsect.
LAT-Audio introduces a global-to-local reasoning approach with TWA-CoT that outperforms prior models on temporal tasks for audio up to 30 minutes.
Fine-tuning multimodal models on a new synthetic spatial benchmark improves generative spatial compliance on real and synthetic tasks and transfers to better spatial understanding.
GeoBrowse is a two-level geolocation benchmark combining visual cue composition with knowledge-intensive multi-hop queries, paired with the GATE agent workflow that outperforms no-tool, search-only, and image-only baselines.
TableVision benchmark shows explicit spatial grounding recovers MLLM reasoning on hierarchical tables, delivering 12.3% accuracy improvement through a decoupled perception-reasoning framework.
DMLR performs dynamic visual-textual interleaving in latent space using confidence-guided latent policy gradient optimization and a dynamic visual injection strategy, yielding improved multimodal reasoning on benchmarks.
ROVER introduces a learnable routing plugin for object-centric visual evidence in MLLMs via token triplets and differential attention, reporting gains on MM-GCoT and VideoEspresso when integrated into Qwen2.5-VL-7B.
InterSketch improves long-horizon visual-textual chain-of-thought in VLMs by dynamically generating and interleaving self-correcting visual sketches with text, using a synthesized dataset plus reflection in cold-start followed by stepwise-reward RL, and reports outperforming Gemini-3-Pro on benchmar
AutoTool uses dual-mode RL to let MLLMs adaptively choose tool use or text-only reasoning, reporting 21.8% accuracy gain on V* and 44.9% efficiency gain on POPE versus baselines.
ToolCUA introduces a trajectory scaling pipeline and staged RL to optimize GUI-tool switching, reaching 46.85% accuracy on OSWorld-MCP for a 66% relative gain over baseline.
Learns state-conditioned commitment depth in a 7B vision-language policy that jointly predicts actions and replan intervals, outperforming fixed-depth baselines and larger models on Sliding Puzzle and Sokoban while providing a theoretical dominance result.
RIS improves MLLM latent visual reasoning by retrieving spatial-semantic evidence, integrating it via attention bottlenecks, and synthesizing it with language transition tokens, yielding gains on V*, HRBench, MMVP, and BLINK benchmarks.
AutoFocus converts token perplexity into an anisotropic Gaussian uncertainty field to drive region proposals and shape-aware zooming for improved GUI grounding in VLMs.
PVM adds a parallel branch to LVLMs that directly supplies visual embeddings to prevent attention decay over long generated sequences, yielding accuracy gains on reasoning tasks with minimal overhead.
OMIBench benchmark reveals that current LVLMs achieve at most 50% on Olympiad problems requiring reasoning across multiple images.
citing papers explorer
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GeoVista: Visually Grounded Active Perception for Ultra-High-Resolution Remote Sensing Understanding
GeoVista introduces a planning-driven active perception framework with global exploration plans, branch-wise local inspection, and explicit evidence tracking to achieve state-of-the-art results on ultra-high-resolution remote sensing benchmarks.
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UniVLR: Unifying Text and Vision in Visual Latent Reasoning for Multimodal LLMs
UniVLR unifies textual and visual reasoning in multimodal LLMs by compressing reasoning traces and auxiliary images into visual latent tokens for direct inference without interleaved text CoT.
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CollabVR: Collaborative Video Reasoning with Vision-Language and Video Generation Models
CollabVR improves video reasoning performance by coupling vision-language models and video generation models in a closed-loop step-level collaboration that detects and repairs generation failures.
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Listening with Time: Precise Temporal Awareness for Long-Form Audio Understanding
LAT-Audio introduces a global-to-local reasoning approach with TWA-CoT that outperforms prior models on temporal tasks for audio up to 30 minutes.
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Exploring Spatial Intelligence from a Generative Perspective
Fine-tuning multimodal models on a new synthetic spatial benchmark improves generative spatial compliance on real and synthetic tasks and transfers to better spatial understanding.
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GeoBrowse: A Geolocation Benchmark for Agentic Tool Use with Expert-Annotated Reasoning Traces
GeoBrowse is a two-level geolocation benchmark combining visual cue composition with knowledge-intensive multi-hop queries, paired with the GATE agent workflow that outperforms no-tool, search-only, and image-only baselines.
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TableVision: A Large-Scale Benchmark for Spatially Grounded Reasoning over Complex Hierarchical Tables
TableVision benchmark shows explicit spatial grounding recovers MLLM reasoning on hierarchical tables, delivering 12.3% accuracy improvement through a decoupled perception-reasoning framework.
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ToolCUA: Towards Optimal GUI-Tool Path Orchestration for Computer Use Agents
ToolCUA introduces a trajectory scaling pipeline and staged RL to optimize GUI-tool switching, reaching 46.85% accuracy on OSWorld-MCP for a 66% relative gain over baseline.
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Retrieve, Integrate, and Synthesize: Spatial-Semantic Grounded Latent Visual Reasoning
RIS improves MLLM latent visual reasoning by retrieving spatial-semantic evidence, integrating it via attention bottlenecks, and synthesizing it with language transition tokens, yielding gains on V*, HRBench, MMVP, and BLINK benchmarks.
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AutoFocus: Uncertainty-Aware Active Visual Search for GUI Grounding
AutoFocus converts token perplexity into an anisotropic Gaussian uncertainty field to drive region proposals and shape-aware zooming for improved GUI grounding in VLMs.
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Persistent Visual Memory: Sustaining Perception for Deep Generation in LVLMs
PVM adds a parallel branch to LVLMs that directly supplies visual embeddings to prevent attention decay over long generated sequences, yielding accuracy gains on reasoning tasks with minimal overhead.
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OMIBench: Benchmarking Olympiad-Level Multi-Image Reasoning in Large Vision-Language Model
OMIBench benchmark reveals that current LVLMs achieve at most 50% on Olympiad problems requiring reasoning across multiple images.
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Towards Long-horizon Agentic Multimodal Search
LMM-Searcher uses file-based visual UIDs and a fetch tool plus 12K synthesized trajectories to fine-tune a multimodal agent that scales to 100-turn horizons and reaches SOTA among open-source models on MM-BrowseComp and MMSearch-Plus.
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GRASP: Grounded CoT Reasoning with Dual-Stage Optimization for Multimodal Sarcasm Target Identification
GRASP improves multimodal sarcasm target identification by anchoring visual regions in grounded chain-of-thought reasoning and using dual-stage optimization on a new balanced dataset.
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Walk the Talk: Bridging the Reasoning-Action Gap for Thinking with Images via Multimodal Agentic Policy Optimization
MAPO improves multimodal chain-of-thought reasoning by requiring explicit textual descriptions of visual tool results and using a novel advantage estimator that combines semantic alignment with task rewards.
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Saliency-R1: Enforcing Interpretable and Faithful Vision-language Reasoning via Saliency-map Alignment Reward
Saliency-R1 uses a novel saliency map technique and GRPO with human bounding-box overlap as reward to improve VLM reasoning faithfulness and interpretability.
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Skyra: AI-Generated Video Detection via Grounded Artifact Reasoning
Skyra is an MLLM that detects AI-generated videos by identifying and reasoning over grounded visual artifacts, supported by a new annotated dataset and benchmark.
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The Landscape of Agentic Reinforcement Learning for LLMs: A Survey
Survey that defines agentic RL for LLMs via POMDPs, introduces a taxonomy of planning/tool-use/memory/reasoning capabilities and domains, and compiles open environments from over 500 papers.
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Enhancing Multimodal In-Context Learning via Inductive-Deductive Reasoning
A framework with similarity-based visual token compression, dynamic attention rebalancing, and explicit inductive-deductive chain-of-thought improves multimodal ICL performance across eight benchmarks for open-source VLMs.
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Q-DeepSight: Incentivizing Thinking with Images for Image Quality Assessment and Refinement
Q-DeepSight proposes a think-with-image multimodal CoT framework trained via RL with perceptual curriculum rewards and evidence gradient filtering to achieve SOTA IQA performance and enable training-free perceptual refinement in image generation.
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Act Wisely: Cultivating Meta-Cognitive Tool Use in Agentic Multimodal Models
HDPO reframes tool efficiency as a conditional objective within accurate trajectories, enabling Metis to reduce tool invocations by orders of magnitude while raising reasoning accuracy.