VTC-R1: Vision-Text Compression for Efficient Long-Context Reasoning

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Wang, Yibo, Jing, Yongcheng, Liu, Shunyu, Guan, Hao, Tu, Rong-cheng, Wang, Chengyu, Huang, Jun, Tao, Dacheng
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Wang, Yibo
Jing, Yongcheng
Liu, Shunyu
Guan, Hao
Tu, Rong-cheng
Wang, Chengyu
Huang, Jun
Tao, Dacheng
author_facet Wang, Yibo
Jing, Yongcheng
Liu, Shunyu
Guan, Hao
Tu, Rong-cheng
Wang, Chengyu
Huang, Jun
Tao, Dacheng
contents Long-context reasoning has significantly empowered large language models (LLMs) to tackle complex tasks, yet it introduces severe efficiency bottlenecks due to the computational complexity. Existing efficient approaches often rely on complex additional training or external models for compression, which limits scalability and discards critical fine-grained information. In this paper, we propose VTC-R1, a new efficient reasoning paradigm that integrates vision-text compression into the reasoning process. Instead of processing lengthy textual traces, VTC-R1 renders intermediate reasoning segments into compact images, which are iteratively fed back into vision-language models as "optical memory." We construct a training dataset based on OpenR1-Math-220K achieving 3.4x token compression and fine-tune representative VLMs-Glyph and Qwen3-VL. Extensive experiments on benchmarks such as MATH500, AIME25, AMC23 and GPQA-D demonstrate that VTC-R1 consistently outperforms standard long-context reasoning. Furthermore, our approach significantly improves inference efficiency, achieving 2.7x speedup in end-to-end latency, highlighting its potential as a scalable solution for reasoning-intensive applications. Our code is available at https://github.com/w-yibo/VTC-R1.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_22069
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle VTC-R1: Vision-Text Compression for Efficient Long-Context Reasoning
Wang, Yibo
Jing, Yongcheng
Liu, Shunyu
Guan, Hao
Tu, Rong-cheng
Wang, Chengyu
Huang, Jun
Tao, Dacheng
Computation and Language
Long-context reasoning has significantly empowered large language models (LLMs) to tackle complex tasks, yet it introduces severe efficiency bottlenecks due to the computational complexity. Existing efficient approaches often rely on complex additional training or external models for compression, which limits scalability and discards critical fine-grained information. In this paper, we propose VTC-R1, a new efficient reasoning paradigm that integrates vision-text compression into the reasoning process. Instead of processing lengthy textual traces, VTC-R1 renders intermediate reasoning segments into compact images, which are iteratively fed back into vision-language models as "optical memory." We construct a training dataset based on OpenR1-Math-220K achieving 3.4x token compression and fine-tune representative VLMs-Glyph and Qwen3-VL. Extensive experiments on benchmarks such as MATH500, AIME25, AMC23 and GPQA-D demonstrate that VTC-R1 consistently outperforms standard long-context reasoning. Furthermore, our approach significantly improves inference efficiency, achieving 2.7x speedup in end-to-end latency, highlighting its potential as a scalable solution for reasoning-intensive applications. Our code is available at https://github.com/w-yibo/VTC-R1.
title VTC-R1: Vision-Text Compression for Efficient Long-Context Reasoning
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.22069