Latent Visual Reasoning

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Li, Bangzheng, Sun, Ximeng, Liu, Jiang, Wang, Ze, Wu, Jialian, Yu, Xiaodong, Chen, Hao, Barsoum, Emad, Chen, Muhao, Liu, Zicheng
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Li, Bangzheng
Sun, Ximeng
Liu, Jiang
Wang, Ze
Wu, Jialian
Yu, Xiaodong
Chen, Hao
Barsoum, Emad
Chen, Muhao
Liu, Zicheng
author_facet Li, Bangzheng
Sun, Ximeng
Liu, Jiang
Wang, Ze
Wu, Jialian
Yu, Xiaodong
Chen, Hao
Barsoum, Emad
Chen, Muhao
Liu, Zicheng
contents 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.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_24251
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Latent Visual Reasoning
Li, Bangzheng
Sun, Ximeng
Liu, Jiang
Wang, Ze
Wu, Jialian
Yu, Xiaodong
Chen, Hao
Barsoum, Emad
Chen, Muhao
Liu, Zicheng
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Computation and Language
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.
title Latent Visual Reasoning
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.24251