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. TableVision: A Large-Scale Benchmark for Spatially Grounded Reasoning over Complex Hierarchical Tables

    Apr 4, 2026Xiaoyu Chen, Lu Dai, Hanqing Wang +6Table ReasoningSpatial Reasoning Benchmarks

  2. Beyond Referring Expressions: Scenario Comprehension Visual Grounding

    Apr 2, 2026Ruozhen He, Nisarg A. Shah, Qihua Dong +3Vision-Language GroundingVisually Grounded Reasoning

  3. Beyond Where to Look: Trajectory-Guided Reinforcement Learning for Multimodal RLVR

    Mar 27, 2026Jinda Lu, Junkang Wu, Jinghan Li +6RL for VLMsMultimodal Reasoning

  4. Can VLMs Reason Robustly? A Neuro-Symbolic Investigation

    Mar 25, 2026Weixin Chen, Antonio Vergari, Han ZhaoVLM RobustnessVisual Reasoning

  5. Beyond Static Visual Tokens: Structured Sequential Visual Chain-of-Thought Reasoning

    Mar 21, 2026Guangfu Guo, Xiaoqian Lu, Yue Feng +1VLM ReasoningMultimodal CoT Reasoning

  6. Grounding the Score: Explicit Visual Premise Verification for Reliable Vision-Language Process Reward Models

    Mar 17, 2026Junxin Wang, Dai Guan, Weijie Qiu +7Process Reward ModelsVLM Reasoning

  7. Visual Set Program Synthesizer

    Mar 16, 2026Zehua Cheng, Wei Dai, Wenhu Zhang +2Visual Program SynthesisVisual Reasoning

  8. Improving Visual Reasoning with Iterative Evidence Refinement

    Mar 14, 2026Zeru Shi, Kai Mei, Yihao Quan +2VLM ReasoningVisually Grounded Reasoning

  9. MM-CondChain: A Programmatically Verified Benchmark for Visually Grounded Deep Compositional Reasoning

    Mar 12, 2026Haozhan Shen, Shilin Yan, Hongwei Xue +5Visually Grounded ReasoningVLM Evaluation

  10. VisDoT : Enhancing Visual Reasoning through Human-Like Interpretation Grounding and Decomposition of Thought

    Mar 12, 2026Eunsoo Lee, Jeongwoo Lee, Minki Hong +2VLM ReasoningVisually Grounded Reasoning

  11. CodePercept: Code-Grounded Visual STEM Perception for MLLMs

    Mar 11, 2026Tongkun Guan, Zhibo Yang, Jianqiang Wan +10Image-to-Code GenerationVisually Grounded Reasoning

  12. DeepScan: A Training-Free Framework for Visually Grounded Reasoning in Large Vision-Language Models

    Mar 4, 2026Yangfu Li, Hongjian Zhan, Jiawei Chen +3VLM ReasoningVisually Grounded Reasoning

  13. Seeing as Experts Do: A Knowledge-Augmented Agent for Open-Set Fine-Grained Visual Understanding

    Mar 4, 2026Junhan Chen, Zilu Zhou, Yujun Tong +3Fine-Grained Visual PerceptionVisually Grounded Reasoning

  14. How RL Unlocks the Aha Moment in Geometric Interleaved Reasoning

    Mar 1, 2026Xiangxiang Zhang, Caijun Jia, Siyuan Li +9Visually Grounded ReasoningRL for Language Model Reasoning

  15. PaLMR: Towards Faithful Visual Reasoning via Multimodal Process Alignment

    Feb 28, 2026Yantao Li, Qiang Hui, Chenyang Yan +8Multimodal ReasoningFaithfulness in VLMs

  16. Thinking with Images as Continuous Actions: Numerical Visual Chain-of-Thought

    Feb 27, 2026Kesen Zhao, Beier Zhu, Junbao Zhou +3Multimodal CoT ReasoningVisual CoT

  17. VisRef: Visual Refocusing while Thinking Improves Test-Time Scaling in Multi-Modal Large Reasoning Models

    Feb 27, 2026Soumya Suvra Ghosal, Youngeun Kim, Zhuowei Li +6Test-Time Scaling for VLMsMultimodal Reasoning

  18. GeoChallenge: A Multi-Answer Multiple-Choice Benchmark for Geometric Reasoning with Diagrams

    Feb 25, 2026Yushun Zhang, Weiping Fu, Zesheng Yang +6Mathematical Reasoning BenchmarksLLM Mathematical Reasoning

  19. When More Is Less: A Systematic Analysis of Spatial and Commonsense Information for Visual Spatial Reasoning

    Feb 25, 2026Muku Akasaka, Soyeon Caren HanVisual Spatial ReasoningVLM Reasoning

  20. A Very Big Video Reasoning Suite

    Feb 23, 2026Maijunxian Wang, Ruisi Wang, Juyi Lin +53Reasoning EvaluationVideo Reasoning

  21. Bridging Modality Disconnect in Self-Reflection via Closed-Loop Visually Grounded Verification

    Feb 21, 2026Haoyu Zhang, Yuwei Wu, Pengxiang Li +6Self-Correction in VLMsVision-Language Models

  22. OpenEarthAgent: A Unified Framework for Tool-Augmented Geospatial Agents

    Feb 19, 2026Akashah Shabbir, Muhammad Umer Sheikh, Muhammad Akhtar Munir +8Geospatial Reasoning BenchmarksRemote Sensing

  23. SPARC: Separating Perception And Reasoning Circuits for Test-time Scaling of VLMs

    Feb 6, 2026Niccolo Avogaro, Nayanika Debnath, Li Mi +6Visual Question AnsweringEfficient VLM Inference

  24. ClueTracer: Question-to-Vision Clue Tracing for Training-Free Hallucination Suppression in Multimodal Reasoning

    Feb 2, 2026Gongli Xi, Kun Wang, Zeming Gao +5VLM Hallucination MitigationMLLM Reasoning

  25. R3G: A Reasoning-Retrieval-Reranking Framework for Vision-Centric Answer Generation

    Jan 25, 2026Zhuohong Chen, Zhengxian Wu, Zirui Liao +6Multimodal RAGVisual Question Answering