Reasoning Within the Mind: Dynamic Multimodal Interleaving in Latent Space

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Liu, Chengzhi, Yang, Yuzhe, Fan, Yue, Wei, Qingyue, Liu, Sheng, Wang, Xin Eric
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Liu, Chengzhi
Yang, Yuzhe
Fan, Yue
Wei, Qingyue
Liu, Sheng
Wang, Xin Eric
author_facet Liu, Chengzhi
Yang, Yuzhe
Fan, Yue
Wei, Qingyue
Liu, Sheng
Wang, Xin Eric
contents 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.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_12623
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Reasoning Within the Mind: Dynamic Multimodal Interleaving in Latent Space
Liu, Chengzhi
Yang, Yuzhe
Fan, Yue
Wei, Qingyue
Liu, Sheng
Wang, Xin Eric
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Computation and Language
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.
title Reasoning Within the Mind: Dynamic Multimodal Interleaving in Latent Space
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.12623