ChemVLR: Prioritizing Reasoning in Perception for Chemical Vision-Language Understanding

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Main Authors: Zhao, Xuanle, Cai, Xinyuan, Cheng, Xiang, Chen, Xiuyi, Xu, Bo
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Zhao, Xuanle
Cai, Xinyuan
Cheng, Xiang
Chen, Xiuyi
Xu, Bo
author_facet Zhao, Xuanle
Cai, Xinyuan
Cheng, Xiang
Chen, Xiuyi
Xu, Bo
contents While Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated significant potential in chemical visual understanding, current models are predominantly optimized for direct visual question-answering tasks. This paradigm often results in "black-box" systems that fail to utilize the inherent capability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to infer underlying reaction mechanisms. In this work, we introduce ChemVLR, a chemical VLM designed to prioritize reasoning within the perception process. Unlike conventional chemical VLMs, ChemVLR analyzes visual inputs in a fine-grained manner by explicitly identifying granular chemical descriptors, such as functional groups, prior to generating answers. This approach ensures the production of explicit and interpretable reasoning paths for complex visual chemical problems. To facilitate this methodology, we implement a cross-modality reverse-engineering strategy, combined with a rigorous filtering pipeline, to curate a large-scale reasoning-and-captioning dataset comprising 760k high-quality samples across molecular and reaction tasks. Furthermore, we adopt a three-stage training framework that systemically builds model perception and reasoning capacity. Experiments demonstrate that ChemVLR achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance, surpassing both leading proprietary models and domain-specific open-source baselines. We also provide comprehensive ablation studies to validate our training strategy and data generation designs. Code and model weights will be available at https://github.com/xxlllz/ChemVLR.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_06685
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle ChemVLR: Prioritizing Reasoning in Perception for Chemical Vision-Language Understanding
Zhao, Xuanle
Cai, Xinyuan
Cheng, Xiang
Chen, Xiuyi
Xu, Bo
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
While Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated significant potential in chemical visual understanding, current models are predominantly optimized for direct visual question-answering tasks. This paradigm often results in "black-box" systems that fail to utilize the inherent capability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to infer underlying reaction mechanisms. In this work, we introduce ChemVLR, a chemical VLM designed to prioritize reasoning within the perception process. Unlike conventional chemical VLMs, ChemVLR analyzes visual inputs in a fine-grained manner by explicitly identifying granular chemical descriptors, such as functional groups, prior to generating answers. This approach ensures the production of explicit and interpretable reasoning paths for complex visual chemical problems. To facilitate this methodology, we implement a cross-modality reverse-engineering strategy, combined with a rigorous filtering pipeline, to curate a large-scale reasoning-and-captioning dataset comprising 760k high-quality samples across molecular and reaction tasks. Furthermore, we adopt a three-stage training framework that systemically builds model perception and reasoning capacity. Experiments demonstrate that ChemVLR achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance, surpassing both leading proprietary models and domain-specific open-source baselines. We also provide comprehensive ablation studies to validate our training strategy and data generation designs. Code and model weights will be available at https://github.com/xxlllz/ChemVLR.
title ChemVLR: Prioritizing Reasoning in Perception for Chemical Vision-Language Understanding
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.06685