Papers with multimodal reasoning
From Multimodal LLM to Human-level AI: Modality, Instruction, Reasoning, Efficiency and beyond (2024.lrec-tutorials)
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| Challenge: | This tutorial aims to deliver a comprehensive review of cutting-edge research in MLLMs. |
| Approach: | This tutorial will review cutting-edge research in MLLMs and examine the impact of ML in learning and reasoning. |
| Outcome: | This course will review cutting-edge research in MLLMs and examine the impact of ML models on learning, learning, and multimodal reasoning. |
When Slower Isn’t Truer: Inverse Scaling Law of Truthfulness in Multimodal Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
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Sitong Fang, Wenjing Cao, Jiahao Li, Xuyao Wang, Chi-Min Chan, Sirui Han, Juntao Dai, Yike Guo, Yaodong Yang, Jiaming Ji
| Challenge: | a study of slow reasoning models for multimodal reasoning finds that they are more prone to fabricating plausible yet false details when confronted with incomplete or misleading visual inputs. |
| Approach: | They conduct the first systematic study of the inverse scaling law in slow-thinking paradigms for multimodal reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The findings suggest that slower reasoning models are more prone to fabricating false details . the study analyzed 5,000-sample hierarchical prompt dataset by 50 participants . |
MM-MATH: Advancing Multimodal Math Evaluation with Process Evaluation and Fine-grained Classification (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for multimodal reasoning in large multimodal models are underperforming on multimodal tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark for multimodal reasoning in large multimodal models, MM-MATH . MM's process evaluation employs LMM-as-a-judge to automatically analyze solution steps . diagram misinterpretation is the most common error, they find . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves only 31% accuracy, compared to 82% for humans. |
A Multistage Extraction Pipeline for Long Scanned Financial Documents: An Empirical Study in Industrial KYC Workflows (2026.acl-industry)
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| Challenge: | Structured information extraction from long, multilingual scanned financial documents is a core requirement in industrial KYC and compliance workflows. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for structured information extraction from long, multilingual scanned financial documents . they combine image preprocessing, multilinguistic OCR, hybrid page-level retrieval and VLMs . |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline outperforms direct PDF-to-VLM baselines on 120 production KYC documents. |
Towards Low-Resource Harmful Meme Detection with LMM Agents (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for harmful meme detection are limited due to the dynamic nature of memes . eliciting knowledge-revising behavior within the LMM agent is a key factor in achieving this goal . |
| Approach: | They propose an agency-driven framework for low-resource harmful meme detection . they use annotated memes to leverage label information as auxiliary signals for model . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves superior performance than state-of-the-art methods on the low-resource harmful meme detection task. |
A Comprehensive Survey of Process Reward Models: Data Generation, Model Construction, and Usage (2026.acl-long)
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Congmin Zheng, Jiachen Zhu, Zhuoying Ou, Yuxiang Chen, Kangning Zhang, Rong Shan, Zeyu Zheng, Mengyue Yang, Jianghao Lin, Yong Yu, Weinan Zhang
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have advanced reasoning ability, yet conventional alignment remains dominated by outcome reward models that judge only final answers. |
| Approach: | They summarize applications across math, code, text, multimodal reasoning, robotics, and agents . goal is to clarify design spaces, reveal open challenges, and guide future research toward fine-grained, robust reasoning alignment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model enables finer credit assignment, richer diagnostics, and improved robustness. |
Visual Goal-Step Inference using wikiHow (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Past work in NLP examined the task of goal-step inference for textual goals . wikiHow dataset shows that goal-step inference is challenging for state-of-the-art models . |
| Approach: | They propose a task where a model is given a textual goal and must choose which of four images represents a plausible step towards that goal. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task is challenging for state-of-the-art multimodal models and can be transferred to other datasets. |
Cracking the Code of Hallucination in LVLMs with Vision-aware Head Divergence (2025.acl-long)
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Jinghan He, Kuan Zhu, Haiyun Guo, Junfeng Fang, Zhenglin Hua, Yuheng Jia, Ming Tang, Tat-Seng Chua, Jinqiao Wang
| Challenge: | Existing methods focus on alignment training or decoding refinements but address symptoms at the generation stage without probing the underlying causes. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free approach to mitigate hallucination by enhancing the role of vision-aware attention heads. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves superior performance compared to state-of-the-art approaches in mitigating hallucinations while maintaining high efficiency with negligible additional time overhead. |
Progressive Multimodal Reasoning via Active Retrieval (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to improve multimodal large language models' reasoning performance are limited. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to progressively improve multimodal reasoning capabilities . they propose active retrieval and Monte Carlo tree search to improve MLLMs' reasoning . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves multimodal reasoning capabilities in multimodal large language models. |
Journey Before Destination: On the importance of Visual Faithfulness in Slow Thinking (2026.eacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing evaluations for visual hallucinations are narrow. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that decomposes reasoning chains into perception versus reasoning steps and uses off-the-shelf VLM judges for step-level faithfulness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces Unfaithful Perception Rate while preserving final-answer accuracy. |
Simple-VGC: Enhancing Visual Grounding in Multimodal Reasoning via Adaptive Tool Composition (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing multimodal large language models suffer from systematic failures in basic visual understanding. |
| Approach: | They propose a tool-augmented reasoning framework with three targeted compensation strategies to address these problems. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves visual grounding by re-injecting the original image to mitigate visual forgetting, the authors show . the proposed framework also improves the accuracy of the visual inputs, the researchers show - and the results are promising . |
Chat-TS: Enhancing Multi-Modal Reasoning Over Time-Series and Natural Language Data (2026.eacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models are being rapidly applied across many fields such as healthcare, finance, transportation, and energy. |
| Approach: | They propose a large language model framework that integrates time-series tokens into LLMs’ vocabulary, enhancing its reasoning ability over time- and textual data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework enhances reasoning ability over time-series and textual data without compromising core natural language capabilities. |
StructBreak: Structural Cognitive Overload-Induced Safety Failures in MLLMs (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Prior work focused on typographic and pixel-level perturbations, leaving the study of SCO unexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that exploits MLLMs' diagrammatic reasoning capabilities to bypass safety guardrails. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework exploits the model's reasoning capabilities to bypass safety guardrails. |
Aligning Text, Code, and Vision: A Multi-Objective Reinforcement Learning Framework for Text-to-Visualization (2026.eacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Text2Vis systems generate functional code but resulting charts lack semantic alignment and clarity. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates post-execution feedback with textual accuracy, code validity, and visualization quality. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms strong zero-shot and supervised baselines and shows robust generalization to out-of-domain datasets. |
Faithful-First Reasoning, Planning, and Acting for Multimodal LLMs (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing efforts to improve task accuracy or enrich COT generation are lacking in multimodal large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a Faithful-First Reasoning, Planning, and Acting framework that evaluates faithfulness of intermediate reasoning and uses it to plan and execute faithfulness-aware actions during inference. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves perceptual faithfulness by up to 24% over prompt-based and tool-augmented reasoning frameworks without degrading task accuracy. |
DART: Disambiguation-Aware Reasoning for Video-guided Machine Translation (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Video-guided Machine Translation (VMT) uses short video clips to enhance translation quality, but many samples are text-sufficient. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates multimodal large language models’ multimodal reasoning into video-guided machine translation by using a pipeline for constructing training data based on multimodal relevance to translation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves multimodal information utilization in video-guided machine translation, yielding gains in translation quality and computational efficiency. |
Flattery in Motion: Benchmarking and Analyzing Sycophancy in Video-LLMs (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Current sycophancy research has largely overlooked its specific manifestations in the video-language domain. |
| Approach: | They propose a video-LLM sycophancy benchmarking and evaluation to evaluate scophancies in video-LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark evaluates sycophantic behavior in state-of-the-art Video-LLMs across diverse question formats, prompt biases, and visual reasoning tasks. |
Test-Time Scaling in Multimodal Foundation Models: A Comprehensive Survey of Generation and Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances have adapted this paradigm to Multimodal Foundation Models (MFMs), unlocking their potential in multimodal reasoning and generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a taxonomy framework that categorizes existing methodologies into three distinct strategies: sampling-based, feedback-based and search-based approaches. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework categorizes existing methodologies into three distinct strategies: sampling-based, feedback-based and search-based approaches. |
R2-MultiOmnia: Leading Multilingual Multimodal Reasoning via Self-Training (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have introduced eclectic strategies to enhance MLLMs’ reasoning capabilities, but they remain related to a single language. |
| Approach: | They propose a modular approach that instructs models to abstract key elements of the reasoning process and refine reasoning trajectories via self-correction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves multimodal reasoning, gets aligned performances among the languages approaching strong models and improves the model's performance. |
Musical Score Understanding Benchmark: Evaluating Large Language Models’ Comprehension of Complete Musical Scores (2026.acl-long)
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Congren Dai, Yue Yang, Krinos Li, Huichi Zhou, Shijie Liang, Zhang Bo, Enyang Liu, Ge Jin, Hongran An, Haosen Zhang, Peiyuan Jing, KinHei Lee, Zhenxuan Zhang, Xiaobing Li, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for musical score understanding are narrow in scope, focusing on isolated fragments, short excerpts, or multiple-choice formulations, rather than supporting holistic reasoning over entire scores. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark for score-level musical understanding across textual and visual modalities. |
| Outcome: | The musical score understanding benchmark contains 1,800 question-answer pairs from works by Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, Debussy, and others. |
Improving Pre-trained Vision-and-Language Embeddings for Phrase Grounding (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have focused on the phrase grounding ability of pretrained vision-and-language models, but it is unclear how they can be used for phrase ground. |
| Approach: | They propose to extract phrase-region pairs from pre-trained vision-and-language embeddings and propose four fine-tuning objectives to improve model phrase grounding ability using image-caption data without any supervised grounding signals. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models in weakly-supervised and supervised phrase grounding settings on two representative datasets and shows that it is possible to achieve better phrase groundability without sacrificing representation generality. |
CofiPara: A Coarse-to-fine Paradigm for Multimodal Sarcasm Target Identification with Large Multimodal Models (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Current methods for multimodal sarcasm target identification focus on superficial indicators in an end-to-end manner, overlooking the nuanced understanding of multimodal content. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal sarcasm target identification framework with a coarse-to-fine paradigm by augmenting sarcasm explainability with reasoning and pre-training knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods and exhibits explainability in deciphering sarcasm as well. |
Modal-specific Pseudo Query Generation for Video Corpus Moment Retrieval (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have shown promising results in video corpus moment retrieval . however, they relied on the expensive query annotations for the VCMR . |
| Approach: | They propose a self-supervised learning framework to localize video corpus moment without annotations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can localize the video corpus moment without any explicit annotation on TVR dataset. |
Multimodal Reasoning with Multimodal Knowledge Graph (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Multimodal reasoning with large language models (LLMs) often suffers from hallucinations and the presence of deficient or outdated knowledge within LLMs. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal reasoning method that leverages multimodal knowledge graphs to learn rich and semantic knowledge across modalities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art models on multimodal question answering and multimodal analogy reasoning tasks while training on only a small fraction of parameters. |
From Charts to Code: A Hierarchical Benchmark for Multimodal Models (2026.acl-long)
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Jiahao Tang, Henry Hengyuan Zhao, Lijian Wu, Zijian Zhang, Yifei Tao, Dongxing Mao, Yang Wan, Jingru Tan, Min Zeng, Min Li, Alex Jinpeng Wang
| Challenge: | Chart2Code is a new benchmark for evaluating the natural language to chart code generation capabilities of large multimodal models. |
| Approach: | They introduce Chart2Code, a new benchmark for evaluating the natural language to chart code generation capabilities of large multimodal models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark is the first to scale task complexity while capturing diverse scenarios. |
MM-Verify: Enhancing Multimodal Reasoning with Chain-of-Thought Verification (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | MM-Verifier and MM Reasoner are a powerful multimodal reasoning model . large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional performance across tasks spanning myriad domains. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which combines tree search and verification to generate high-quality chain-of-thought data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms all larger models on the MathCheck, MathVista, and MathVerse benchmarks. |
Retrieval Enhanced Feedback via In-context Neural Error-book (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for learning from errors lack a structured framework for analyzing and mitigating errors, especially in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose a teacher-student framework that systematically structures errors to deliver targeted feedback for multimodal reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves inference efficiency, token usage, and scalability by building a query-based structure that prioritizes visual information, diagnoses failure points, and guides corrective actions. |
RSVP: Reasoning Segmentation via Visual Prompting and Multi-modal Chain-of-Thought (2025.acl-long)
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Yi Lu, Jiawang Cao, Yongliang Wu, Bozheng Li, Licheng Tang, Yangguang Ji, Chong Wu, Jay Wu, Wenbo Zhu
| Challenge: | Recent advances in multi-modal learning have enhanced MLLMs' ability to reason about visual content. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that unifies multi-step multimodal reasoning with grounded visual understanding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses state-of-the-art methods by +6.5 gIoU and +9.2 cIou on ReasonSeg and achieves 49.7 mAP on SegInW under zero-shot settings. |
SHARP: Steering Hallucination in LVLMs via Representation Engineering (2025.emnlp-main)
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Junfei Wu, Yue Ding, Guofan Liu, Tianze Xia, Ziyue Huang, Dianbo Sui, Qiang Liu, Shu Wu, Liang Wang, Tieniu Tan
| Challenge: | Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) generate responses that are plausible but incorrect or unsupported—commonly referred to as hallucinations. |
| Approach: | They propose a representation-level intervention framework that modulates hallucination-related features during inference by probing their encoded features. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces hallucinations while maintaining the performance and generalization capabilities of Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs). |
Global Context or Local Detail? Adaptive Visual Grounding for Hallucination Mitigation (2026.findings-acl)
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Yubo Jiang, Xin Yang, Abudukelimu Wuerkaixi, Zheming Yuan, Xuxin Cheng, Cao Liu, Ke Zeng, Fengying Xie, Zhiguo Jiang, Haopeng Zhang
| Challenge: | Large vision–language models suffer from object-existence hallucinations when multi-step deliberation decouples from visual evidence. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that allocates visual computation by uncertainty . they propose highlighting retains global context, while selective zoom-in performs local verification. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces the complexity of multimodal reasoning by minimizing the operator trade-off. |
Revealing and Enhancing Core Visual Regions: Harnessing Internal Attention Dynamics for Hallucination Mitigation in LVLMs (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing training-free methods are vulnerable to the attention sink phenomenon . Existing methods include contrastive decoding and auxiliary expert models . |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free attention intervention that constructs a PAD map to identify semantically core visual regions and applies per-head Median Absolute Deviation Scaling to adaptively control the intervention strength. |
| Outcome: | The proposed intervention improves visual grounding and reduces hallucinations on multiple LVLMs and benchmarks. |
MUCAR: Benchmarking Multilingual Cross-Modal Ambiguity Resolution for Multimodal Large Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)
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Xiaolong Wang, Zhaolu Kang, Wangyuxuan Zhai, Xinyue Lou, Yunghwei Lai, Ziyue Wang, Yawen Wang, Kaiyu Huang, Yile Wang, Peng Li, Yang Liu
| Challenge: | Existing multimodal benchmarks overlook linguistic and visual ambiguities, authors say . ambiguity resolution between modalities is lacking in multimodal large language models . |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate multimodal ambiguity resolution across multilingual and cross-modal scenarios. |
| Outcome: | a new benchmark evaluates multimodal ambiguity resolution across multilingual and cross-modal scenarios . the benchmark shows that MLLMs can resolve ambiguities in image-text alignment . however, existing benchmarks often overlook linguistic and visual ambiguties . |
SceneAlign: Aligning Multimodal Reasoning to Scene Graphs in Complex Visual Scenes (2026.acl-long)
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Chuhan Wang, Xintong Li, Jennifer Yuntong Zhang, Junda Wu, Chengkai Huang, Lina Yao, Julian McAuley, Jingbo Shang
| Challenge: | Existing preference-based approaches fail to address this challenge by exploiting language priors to bypass visual grounding. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages scene graphs as structured visual information to perform controllable structural interventions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves answer accuracy and reasoning faithfulness across seven visual reasoning benchmarks. |
MMBoundary: Advancing MLLM Knowledge Boundary Awareness through Reasoning Step Confidence Calibration (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods calibrate model confidence on entire response, which leads to incorrect answers with high confidence. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that advances the knowledge boundary awareness of multimodal large language models through reasoning step confidence calibration. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that the proposed framework outperforms existing methods across domains and metrics. |
Knowledge-Aware Reasoning over Multimodal Semi-structured Tables (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Suyash Mathur, Jainit Bafna, Kunal Kartik, Harshita Khandelwal, Manish Shrivastava, Vivek Gupta, Mohit Bansal, Dan Roth
| Challenge: | Existing datasets for tabular question answering focus on text within cells, but real-world data is multimodal, often blending images such as symbols, faces, icons, patterns, and charts with textual content. |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset to assess whether current AI models can perform knowledge-aware reasoning on multimodal structured data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset is a robust benchmark for advancing AI’s comprehension and capabilities in analyzing multimodal structured data. |
ECHA: Jailbreaking LVLMs via the Mismatch between Implicit Semantic Reconstruction and Explicit Safety Alignment (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing safety guardrails fail to intercept latent intent, whereas LVLMs can implicitly synthesize holistic malicious semantics from fragmented visual cues. |
| Approach: | They propose an Emoji Chain Hinting Attack (ECHA) framework that decouples sensitive concepts into semantically related emoji chains and structural text masks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing baselines and bypasses safety guardrails in over 81% of instances with a single attempt. |
Multimodal Inconsistency Reasoning (MMIR): A New Benchmark for Multimodal Reasoning Models (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are predominantly trained on consistent visual-textual inputs, leaving open the question of whether they can handle semantic mismatches in layout-rich content. |
| Approach: | They propose to use multimodal inconsistency reasoning to assess MLLMs' ability to reason about semantic mismatches in webpages, presentation slides, and posters. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms open-source models in detecting inconsistencies in webpages, presentation slides, and posters while remaining vulnerable to inconsistent errors. |
C²RBench: A Chinese Complex Reasoning Benchmark for Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks often fail to capture complex multi-step reasoning demands inherent in real-world scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate multi-step, multimodal advanced reasoning of large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark exceeds existing benchmarks in cognitive complexity and accuracy by over 90% . it features 1,115 carefully curated Chinese tasks organized into eight domain-specific subsets . evaluations of 20 LLMs and 24 multimodal large language models reveal critical performance gaps . |
Audio-Reasoner: Improving Reasoning Capability in Large Audio Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in multimodal reasoning overlook the audio modality. |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale audio language model for deep reasoning that leverages a multitask audio dataset. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs well across key benchmarks including MMAU-mini, AIR-Bench chat/foundation, and MELD. |
MEXA: Towards General Multimodal Reasoning with Dynamic Multi-Expert Aggregation (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | MEXA is a training-free framework that performs modality- and task-aware aggregation of multiple expert models to enable effective multimodal reasoning across diverse domains. |
| Approach: | MEXA is a training-free framework that performs modality- and task-aware aggregation of multiple expert models. |
| Outcome: | MEXA performs modality- and task-aware aggregation of multiple expert models . it generates interpretable textual reasoning outputs and reasons over them using a Large Reasoning Model (LRM) MEX A consistently delivers performance improvements over strong multimodal benchmarks . |
RATION: Entropy-Driven Task-Adaptive Visual Attention Allocation Framework for Multimodal Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Prior studies have focused on strengthening multimodal reasoning by improving representation alignment or increasing computation, but these methods do not characterize the differences in visual demands across tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose an entropy-driven task-adaptive visual attention allocation framework that uses visual attention entropic as a control signal to dynamically allocate attention according to task demands. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves consistent performance gains across diverse reasoning tasks, datasets, and models, providing a clear direction toward more reliable multimodal reasoning. |
Fast Retrieval and Slow Reasoning for Explainable Multimodal Sentiment Analysis (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing multimodal sentiment analysis methods rely on holistic fusion . such strategies introduce redundant information and obscure the decision process . |
| Approach: | They propose an interpretable framework that decomposes multimodal sentiment modeling into two cooperative pathways. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves competitive performance, higher efficiency, stronger robustness to noise, and clearer decision transparency than existing holistic fusion methods. |
View-R1: Asymmetric Policy Optimization for Difficulty-Aware Multimodal Reinforcement Learning (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are powerful at integrating diverse data but struggle with complex reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which separates responses into positive and negative groups to stabilize training and preserve knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model View-R1 achieves a 10.55% improvement in reasoning and outperforms larger models while maintaining and improving performance on general tasks. |
A Graph Talks, But Who’s Listening? Rethinking Evaluations for Graph-Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for Graph-Language Models (GLMs) do not assess true multimodal integration. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate multimodal reasoning over graph topology and textual semantics. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks show that strong performance is achievable using textual or structural features in isolation, bypassing the need for joint reasoning. |
FIND: Toward Multimodal Financial Reasoning and Question Answering for Indic Languages (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for numerical reasoning in multilingual Indic languages are inadequate . e.g., FinVQA is a framework for evaluating financial numerical reasoning . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that combines supervised fine-tuning with constraint-aware decoding to promote faithful numerical reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework spans English, Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Gujarati, and Tamil . it combines supervised fine-tuning with constraint-aware decoding to promote faithful numerical reasoning . |
Agent for Numerical Data Retrieval and Understanding by Code Generation and Multimodal Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Numerical data from sensors and time series are widely used in scientific research fields such as nuclear fusion . efficient numerical data analysis tools are crucial to accelerate experimental research . |
| Approach: | They propose a model-agnostic and data-adic agent that processes numerical data by code generation and multimodal reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent outperforms existing methods on benchmarks on sensor data classification and time series understanding. |
Omni-R1: Towards the Unified Generative Paradigm for Multimodal Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Early approaches focus on text-based reasoning, but they often follow a single task-specific reasoning pattern. |
| Approach: | They propose a generative multimodal reasoning paradigm that unifies diverse reasoning skills by generating intermediate images during the reasoning process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model unifies diverse multimodal reasoning skills by generating intermediate images during the reasoning process. |
VL-Calibration: Decoupled Confidence Calibration for Large Vision-Language Models Reasoning (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing verbalized confidence calibration methods for large vision language models optimize a single holistic confidence score using binary answer-level correctness. |
| Approach: | They propose a reinforcement learning framework that explicitly decouples confidence into visual and reasoning confidence. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that the proposed framework decouples confidence into visual and reasoning confidence while suppressing ungrounded hallucinations while preserving valid perception. |
Towards Mitigating Hallucinations in Large Vision-Language Models by Refining Textual Embeddings (2026.findings-acl)
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Aakriti Agrawal, Gouthaman KV, Rohith Aralikatti, Gauri Jagatap, Jiaxin Yuan, Sarvesh Baskar, Vijay Kamarshi, Andrea Fanelli, Furong Huang
| Challenge: | Hallucinations in Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) are a persistent challenge, stemming from inadequate integration of visual information during multimodal reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a visual feature incorporation method that encourages the model to learn visually-informed textual embeddings distinct from those of the base LLM and promotes a more balanced attention distribution. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly reduces hallucinations and fosters more balanced multimodal reasoning. |