UniVLR: Unifying Text and Vision in Visual Latent Reasoning for Multimodal LLMs

Fuente: arXiv
Gespeichert in:
Bibliographische Detailangaben
Hauptverfasser: Jiang, Houcheng, Fu, Jiajun, Fang, Junfeng, Gao, Chen, Wang, Xiang, He, Xiangnan, Li, Yong
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
Schlagworte:
Online-Zugang:
Tags: Tag hinzufügen
Keine Tags, Fügen Sie den ersten Tag hinzu!
_version_ 1866911673752748032
author Jiang, Houcheng
Fu, Jiajun
Fang, Junfeng
Gao, Chen
Wang, Xiang
He, Xiangnan
Li, Yong
author_facet Jiang, Houcheng
Fu, Jiajun
Fang, Junfeng
Gao, Chen
Wang, Xiang
He, Xiangnan
Li, Yong
contents Multimodal large language models are increasingly expected to perform thinking with images, yet existing visual latent reasoning methods still rely on explicit textual chain-of-thought interleaved with visual latent tokens. This interleaved design limits efficiency and keeps reasoning fragmented across separate text and vision channels. We propose UniVLR, a unified visual latent reasoning framework that treats textual reasoning and auxiliary visual evidence as a shared visual workspace. Instead of preserving text CoT as an independent inference-time path, UniVLR renders reasoning traces together with auxiliary images and learns to compress this unified representation into compact visual latent tokens. At inference time, the model reasons only through visual latents and directly decodes the final answer, avoiding both external tool calls and verbose text reasoning. Experiments on real-world perception and visual reasoning tasks show that UniVLR outperforms prior visual latent reasoning methods while using substantially fewer generated reasoning tokens, suggesting a more unified and efficient paradigm for visual thinking in MLLMs.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_11856
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle UniVLR: Unifying Text and Vision in Visual Latent Reasoning for Multimodal LLMs
Jiang, Houcheng
Fu, Jiajun
Fang, Junfeng
Gao, Chen
Wang, Xiang
He, Xiangnan
Li, Yong
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Computation and Language
Multimodal large language models are increasingly expected to perform thinking with images, yet existing visual latent reasoning methods still rely on explicit textual chain-of-thought interleaved with visual latent tokens. This interleaved design limits efficiency and keeps reasoning fragmented across separate text and vision channels. We propose UniVLR, a unified visual latent reasoning framework that treats textual reasoning and auxiliary visual evidence as a shared visual workspace. Instead of preserving text CoT as an independent inference-time path, UniVLR renders reasoning traces together with auxiliary images and learns to compress this unified representation into compact visual latent tokens. At inference time, the model reasons only through visual latents and directly decodes the final answer, avoiding both external tool calls and verbose text reasoning. Experiments on real-world perception and visual reasoning tasks show that UniVLR outperforms prior visual latent reasoning methods while using substantially fewer generated reasoning tokens, suggesting a more unified and efficient paradigm for visual thinking in MLLMs.
title UniVLR: Unifying Text and Vision in Visual Latent Reasoning for Multimodal LLMs
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.11856