Figure It Out: Improve the Frontier of Reasoning with Executable Visual States (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent reasoning models fail to capture structural constraints in complex settings. |
| Approach: | They propose a visual-based reasoning system that integrates executable visual construction into multi-turn reasoning via end-to-end reinforcement learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms strong text-only chain-of-thought models on seven mathematical benchmarks and improves by 13.12% on AIME 2025 and 11.00% on BeyondAIME. |
Similar Papers
VisualCoder: Guiding Large Language Models in Code Execution with Fine-grained Multimodal Chain-of-Thought Reasoning (2025.findings-naacl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to enhance large language models' ability to predict program behavior struggle with dynamic reasoning tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a visual control flow graph that integrates CoT reasoning with a control flow . they aim to improve performance in program behavior prediction, error detection and output generation . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves program behavior prediction, error detection, and output generation. |
Revealing the Seen, Imagining the Beyond: A Survey of Image-Grounded Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in Multimodal LLMs (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent advances in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shifted visual reasoning from tool-calling to end-to-end perceptionreasoning. |
| Approach: | They synthesize the emerging paradigm of Image-Grounded Chain-of-Thought (IG-CoT) they propose a method-centric taxonomy covering prompting, supervised fine-tuning, and reinforcement learning . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is based on a method-centric taxonomy and benchmarks. |
Enhancing Advanced Visual Reasoning Ability of Large Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent advances in Vision-Language (VL) research have sparked new benchmarks for complex visual reasoning, challenging models’ advanced reasoning ability. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel multi-modal in-context learning methodology to enhance LLMs’ contextual understanding and reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves SOTA performance among all visual reasoning tasks and achieves a 'higher level of accuracy' than previous models. |
Graph Reasoning Paradigm: Structured and Symbolic Reasoning with Topology-Aware Reinforcement Learning for Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Runxuan Liu, Xianhao Ou, Xinyan Ma, Jiyuan Wang, Jiafeng Liang, Jiaqi Li, Tao He, Zheng Chu, Rongchuan Mu, Zekun Wang, Baoxin Wang, Dayong Wu, Ming Liu, Shijin Wang, Guoping Hu, Bing Qin
| Challenge: | Existing methods for long chain-of-thought (LCoT) are coarse-grained, reward hacking, and poor generalization. |
| Approach: | They propose a Long Chain-of-Thought (LCoT) model that integrates reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards with a process-aware verification approach. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves reasoning and code generation tasks while reducing the cost of training and performance bottlenecks. |
E-ViC: Reasoning Beyond Text via Embodied Visual Chain for Spatial Intelligence (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Junbo Qi, Yi Zhang, Hanchu Ni, Che Liu, Zhimin Yao, Ruilin Yang, Xiancong Ren, Liangjian Wen, Wei Ge, Yuya Ieiri, Osamu Yoshie, Yong Dai, Xiaozhu Ju
| Challenge: | Existing Vision-Language Models (VLMs) lack spatial reasoning, despite text-based CoTs . e-ViC reframes spatial intelligence as a verifiable, tool-using capability, argues a new study. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that moves reasoning beyond text into the visual domain . they ground reasoning in pixel-level interactions to enable human-like "look-and-confirm" strategies . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing Vision-Language Models with an average gain of 10.1%. |
REVEALER: Reinforcement-Guided Visual Reasoning for Element-Level Text-Image Alignment Evaluation (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for text-to-image alignment evaluation rely on coarse-grained metrics or static Question Answering pipelines that lack fine-grounded interpretability and struggle to reflect human preferences. |
| Approach: | They propose a reinforcement-guided visual reasoning framework for element-level text-to-image alignment evaluation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art results on four benchmarks and surpasses the strong proprietary Gemini 3 Pro and Training-based baselines. |
ERRV: Eliciting Efficient Reasoning through Reasoning Vectors for Policy Optimization in Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing efforts to improve reasoning efficiency of large language models focus on modifying the reinforcement learning reward, such as adding length penalties. |
| Approach: | They propose a training framework that elicits efficient reasoning through reasoning vectors and a framework that allows the model to generate high-quality responses during reinforcement learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces reasoning length by 30% while maintaining stability, while retaining high accuracy. |
MathCanvas: Intrinsic Visual Chain-of-Thought for Multimodal Mathematical Reasoning (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Weikang Shi, Aldrich Yu, Rongyao Fang, Houxing Ren, Ke Wang, Aojun Zhou, Changyao Tian, Xinyu Fu, Yuxuan Hu, Zimu Lu, Linjiang Huang, Si Liu, Rui Liu, Hongsheng Li
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to visual chain-of-thought are limited by external tools or fail to generate high-fidelity diagrams. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to enable large multimodal models with VCoT capabilities . they pre-train a model on a 15.2M-pair corpus and teach it how to leverage visual aids . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework unlocks complex, human-like visual reasoning in large language models . it pre-trains the model on a 15.2M-pair corpus and fine-tunes it on MathCanvas-Instruct . |
Reasoning While Asking: Transforming Reasoning Large Language Models from Passive Solvers to Proactive Inquirers (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing reasoning-oriented LLMs lack a blind self-thinking paradigm . current models fail to recognize when their reasoning is underinformed or based on ambiguous user instructions . |
| Approach: | They propose a new reasoning paradigm that transforms LLMs into proactive inquirers that interleave reasoning with clarification. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models on mathematical reasoning, code generation, and document editing. |
SLR: Automated Synthesis for Scalable Logical Reasoning (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Lukas Helff, Ahmad Omar, Felix Friedrich, Antonia Wüst, Hikaru Shindo, Rupert Mitchell, Tim Woydt, Patrick Schramowski, Wolfgang Stammer, Kristian Kersting
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks intended to evaluate reasoning capabilities emphasize deductive reasoning, where conclusions necessarily follow from given premises. |
| Approach: | They propose an end-to-end framework for systematic evaluation and training of Large Language Models via Scalable Logical Reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework doubles Llama-3-8B accuracy on SLR-Bench, achieving parity with Gemini-Flash-Thinking at a fraction of computational cost. |