Visually Grounded Reasoning

Overview

Visually grounded reasoning studies how models use images, video, diagrams, and other visual inputs to support conclusions and actions with relevant evidence. Common approaches include locating regions or pixels, building scene graphs and symbolic programs, interleaving visual inspection with language reasoning, and using active perception to seek additional views or details. Benchmarks test settings such as spatial and compositional questions, charts and diagrams, video events, and embodied planning, increasingly scoring evidence alignment as well as answer accuracy. A central challenge is that better perception does not guarantee that evidence will guide later reasoning: language priors and long reasoning traces can override visual details, while extra inspection or computation can be costly or ineffective.

Latest papers

CardsList

344 papers24 papers in the last four weeks, up 41% on the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.

  1. CASHEW: Stabilizing Multimodal Reasoning via Iterative Trajectory Aggregation

    Jan 12, 2026Chaoyu Li, Fei Tao, Pooyan FazliTest-Time Scaling for VLMsTest-Time Scaling

  2. BabyVision: Visual Reasoning Beyond Language

    Jan 10, 2026Liang Chen, Weichu Xie, Yiyan Liang +27VLM EvaluationVisual Reasoning

  3. CoSPlan: Corrective Sequential Planning via Scene Graph Incremental Updates

    Dec 11, 2025Shresth Grover, Priyank Pathak, Akash Kumar +1VLM ReasoningVisually Grounded Reasoning

  4. VisReason: A Large-Scale Dataset for Visual Chain-of-Thought Reasoning

    Nov 21, 2025Lingxiao Li, Yifan Wang, Xinyan Gao +3Visual Spatial ReasoningVisual Reasoning

  5. SpatialThinker: Reinforcing Scene Graph-Grounded Spatial Reasoning via Dense Rewards

    Nov 10, 2025Hunar Batra, Haoqin Tu, Hardy Chen +3Multimodal UnderstandingScene Graph Generation

  6. Explain Before You Answer: A Survey on Compositional Visual Reasoning

    Aug 24, 2025Fucai Ke, Joy Hsu, Zhixi Cai +10Compositional ReasoningVisual Reasoning

  7. A Study of Commonsense Reasoning over Visual Object Properties

    Aug 14, 2025Abhishek Kolari, Mohammadhossein Khojasteh, Yifan Jiang +2VLM EvaluationVisual Question Answering

  8. Position: Reasoning After Perception Means Reasoning Without Vision

    Jul 21, 2025Hongcheng Gao, Zihao Huang, Jingyi Tang +12Multimodal UnderstandingVisual Reasoning

  9. AntiGrounding: Executable Robot Trajectories as Visual Prompts for VLM-Guided Manipulation

    Jun 14, 2025Wenbo Li, Yiteng Chen, Wenhao Li +1Trajectory GenerationLanguage-Conditioned Robot Manipulation

  10. Gondola: Grounded Vision Language Planning for Robotic Manipulation

    Jun 12, 2025Shizhe Chen, Ricardo Garcia, Paul Pacaud +1Long-Horizon Robotic ManipulationRobot Task Planning

  11. ViPlan: A Benchmark for Visual Planning with Symbolic Predicates and Vision-Language Models

    May 19, 2025Matteo Merler, Nicola Dainese, Minttu Alakuijala +5Large Language Model-Based Robot PlanningSymbolic Planning

  12. ZeroBench: An Impossible Visual Benchmark for Contemporary Large Multimodal Models

    Feb 13, 2025Jonathan Roberts, Mohammad Reza Taesiri, Ansh Sharma +31Visually Grounded ReasoningVLM Reasoning