Visual reasoning models (VRMs) have recently shown strong cross-modal reasoning capabilities by integrating visual perception with language reasoning. However, they often suffer from overthinking, producing unnecessarily long reasoning chains for any tasks. We attribute this issue to \textbf{Reasoning Path Redundancy} in visual reasoning: many visual questions do not require the full reasoning process. To address this, we propose \textbf{AVR}, an adaptive visual reasoning framework that decomposes visual reasoning into three cognitive functions: visual perception, logical reasoning, and answer application. It further enables models to dynamically choose among three response formats: Full Format, Perception-Only Format, and Direct Answer. AVR is trained with FS-GRPO, an adaptation of Group Relative Policy Optimization that encourages the model to select the most efficient reasoning format while preserving correctness. Experiments on multiple vision-language benchmarks show that AVR reduces token usage by 50--90% while maintaining overall accuracy, especially in perception-intensive tasks. These results demonstrate that adaptive visual reasoning can effectively mitigate overthinking in VRMs. Code and data are available at: https://github.com/RunRiotComeOn/AVR.
Fine-grained visual reasoning remains challenging for vision-language models, especially when small but critical visual cues are buried in high-resolution images. Existing approaches rely on repeated cropping or test-time visual search to introduce local evidence, but they typically do not explicitly distinguish perception from reasoning. In this paper, we propose Perceive-to-Reason (P2R), a unified framework that formulates fine-grained visual reasoning as a two-stage process: the model first localizes question-relevant evidence as a Perceiver, and then answers the question as a Reasoner based on the annotated image and cropped regions. To better align training with this decoupled formulation, we further introduce Perception-Reasoning Alternating GRPO (PRA-GRPO), a role-aware reinforcement learning strategy that alternates between perception-focused and reasoning-focused updates using only final-answer supervision. Built on top of Qwen3-VL-Instruct-2B/4B/8B, P2R consistently improves performance across model scales. In particular, P2R-4B achieves 93.2% on V-Star, 81.9% on HR-Bench-4K, and 80.5% on HR-Bench-8K, substantially outperforming its corresponding backbone. Further experiments show that the benefits of P2R extend beyond high-resolution benchmarks to broader multimodal reasoning tasks. These results suggest that explicitly decoupling perception from reasoning provides an effective framework for fine-grained visual reasoning.
With the rapid advancement of large multimodal models (LMMs), inference-time overhead has become a key bottleneck for real-world deployment. Existing methods typically prune visual tokens at prefill, assuming the required visual evidence remains static during reasoning. However, we empirically show that visual evidence is strongly step-dependent: only a sparse subset of visual tokens is critical at each decoding step, and the critical set evolves across reasoning. Furthermore, we identify a coupled bottleneck where redundant visual context can steer the model toward query-irrelevant regions, lengthening the reasoning trace. Guided by these insights, we propose VisionPulse, a step-wise visual token pruning framework during reasoning. VisionPulse computes a lightweight visual attention mass to estimate the step-wise retention budget by exploiting its strong positive correlation with LMMs' effective visual token usage and retain only the most critical tokens under this budget. By enforcing visual sparsity during reasoning, VisionPulse filters redundant visual context while preserving relevant visual evidence, shortening reasoning traces naturally. Extensive experiments show that VisionPulse only retains 5% of visual tokens per step with reasoning traces shortened by 11.2%, while keeping accuracy almost unchanged.
Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning can improve performance on difficult video questions but often wastes decoding tokens on simple ones. We study whether a video multimodal large language model can adapt its reasoning effort to each question. We propose AdaThinkV, an adaptive framework for video reasoning that learns whether to reason explicitly without offline difficulty labels, manually tuned confidence thresholds, or an external router. During reinforcement learning, AdaThinkV samples matched rollouts in explicit reasoning and direct answering modes for each prompt. ThinkGain estimates the prompt-level utility of explicit reasoning by balancing its accuracy gain against additional response length, providing supervision for both conditional response generation and autonomous mode selection. For difficult prompts, limited rollout exploration can yield groups in which every response is unsuccessful and accuracy rewards show little variation, providing insufficient signal for learning. We therefore introduce Variance Recovery Policy Optimization (VRPO), which retains and progressively expands these groups to recover informative signals from prompts that are difficult yet solvable. At inference, AdaThinkV selects a response mode and generates the response in a single autoregressive sequence. Across a unified suite of video reasoning evaluations, AdaThinkV achieves a mean accuracy of 40.79 with an average of 257.20 output tokens, outperforming the strongest evaluated adaptive baseline by 2.98 points while using 22.7% fewer tokens. Project page: https://trilarflagz.github.io/AdaThinkV/