Overview

Multimodal reasoning studies how models perceive information across modalities, connect that evidence to knowledge, and use it to answer questions, plan actions, or explain decisions. Common approaches include instruction tuning and chain-of-thought training, reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards, tool-using agents, and structured methods such as graphs or symbolic solvers. Benchmarks such as MathVista and MMMU test visual problem solving, while video, document, scientific, and medical tasks probe reasoning across time and specialized evidence. A central challenge is ensuring that correct answers actually depend on relevant multimodal evidence rather than language shortcuts; grounding, cross-modal integration, and reliable generalization remain difficult.

Latest papers

512 papers47 papers in the last four weeks, down 10% on the four weeks before. 0.3% of all new papers.

Jun 11, 2025

Evidence-Grounded Trustworthy Multimodal Reasoning and Evaluation Benchmark in Complex Urban Scenes

While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) demonstrate impressive performance in benign scenarios, their cognitive reliability deteriorates significantly in complex scenes under adverse conditions. In these settings, models often rely on implicit inference without sufficient visual evidence, leading to a disconnect between perception and reasoning. Meanwhile, existing outcome-oriented benchmarks evaluate only final predictions and fail to diagnose failures in the underlying reasoning process. To address this gap, the authors propose AD2-Bench, which introduces a Hierarchical Visual Diagnosis framework that decomposes reasoning into a structured Chain of Evidence (CoE). This fine-grained diagnosis reveals that robust multimodal reasoning fundamentally depends on accurate evidence acquisition. Building on this perspective, the authors formulate reasoning from a probabilistic viewpoint and identify two primary causes of reasoning failure: Spatial Ambiguity, where models fail to distinguish target objects from background clutter, resulting in localization errors; and Semantic Uncertainty, where degraded visual features lead to incorrect semantic interpretation, resulting in understanding errors. To overcome these evidence deficiencies, they further propose Evidence-grounded Visual Reasoning (EGVOR), which replaces implicit reasoning with the explicit generation of Evidence Atoms - structured spatial-semantic triplets that enforce tight alignment between localization and semantic understanding. The model is trained through a hierarchical curriculum that progresses from reflective supervision construction to reinforcement learning, where reducing reasoning variance is explicitly rewarded. Extensive experiments demonstrate that EGVOR substantially improves reasoning stability under adverse conditions, providing a more robust framework for trustworthy multimodal cognition.
Jun 8, 2025

Lingshu: A Generalist Foundation Model for Unified Multimodal Medical Understanding and Reasoning

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in understanding common visual elements, largely due to their large-scale datasets and advanced training strategies. However, their effectiveness in medical applications remains limited due to the inherent discrepancies between data and tasks in medical scenarios and those in the general domain. Concretely, existing medical MLLMs face the following critical limitations: (1) limited coverage of medical knowledge beyond imaging, (2) heightened susceptibility to hallucinations due to suboptimal data curation processes, (3) lack of reasoning capabilities tailored for complex medical scenarios. To address these challenges, we first propose a comprehensive data curation procedure that (1) efficiently acquires rich medical knowledge data not only from medical imaging but also from extensive medical texts and general-domain data; and (2) synthesizes accurate medical captions, visual question answering (VQA), and reasoning samples. As a result, we build a multimodal dataset enriched with extensive medical knowledge. Building on the curated data, we introduce our medical-specialized MLLM: Lingshu. Lingshu undergoes multi-stage training to embed medical expertise and enhance its task-solving capabilities progressively. Besides, we preliminarily explore the potential of applying reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards paradigm to enhance Lingshu's medical reasoning ability. Additionally, we develop MedEvalKit, a unified evaluation framework that consolidates leading multimodal and textual medical benchmarks for standardized, fair, and efficient model assessment. We evaluate the performance of Lingshu on three fundamental medical tasks, multimodal QA, text-based QA, and medical report generation. The results show that Lingshu consistently outperforms the existing open-source multimodal models on most tasks ...