Daily Papers

Beginning with VisualGLM and CogVLM, we are continuously exploring VLMs in pursuit of enhanced vision-language fusion, efficient higher-resolution architecture, and broader modalities and applications. Here we propose the CogVLM2 family, a new generation of visual language models for image and video understanding including CogVLM2, CogVLM2-Video and GLM-4V. As an image understanding model, CogVLM2 inherits the visual expert architecture with improved training recipes in both pre-training and post-training stages, supporting input resolution up to 1344 times 1344 pixels. As a video understanding model, CogVLM2-Video integrates multi-frame input with timestamps and proposes automated temporal grounding data construction. Notably, CogVLM2 family has achieved state-of-the-art results on benchmarks like MMBench, MM-Vet, TextVQA, MVBench and VCGBench. All models are open-sourced in https://github.com/THUDM/CogVLM2 and https://github.com/THUDM/GLM-4, contributing to the advancement of the field.

World models simulate environmental dynamics to enable agents to plan and reason about future states. While existing approaches have primarily focused on visual observations, real-world perception inherently involves multiple sensory modalities. Audio provides crucial spatial and temporal cues such as sound source localization and acoustic scene properties, yet its integration into world models remains largely unexplored. No prior work has formally defined what constitutes an audio-visual world model or how to jointly capture binaural spatial audio and visual dynamics under precise action control with task reward prediction. This work presents the first formal framework for Audio-Visual World Models (AVWM), formulating multimodal environment simulation as a partially observable Markov decision process with synchronized audio-visual observations, fine-grained actions, and task rewards. To address the lack of suitable training data, we construct AVW-4k, a dataset comprising 30 hours of binaural audio-visual trajectories with action annotations and reward signals across 76 indoor environments. We propose AV-CDiT, an Audio-Visual Conditional Diffusion Transformer with a novel modality expert architecture that balances visual and auditory learning, optimized through a three-stage training strategy for effective multimodal integration. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AV-CDiT achieves high-fidelity multimodal prediction across visual and auditory modalities with reward. Furthermore, we validate its practical utility in continuous audio-visual navigation tasks, where AVWM significantly enhances the agent's performance.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) based on Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures have emerged as a pivotal paradigm in multimodal understanding, offering a powerful framework for integrating visual and linguistic information. However, the increasing complexity and diversity of tasks present significant challenges in coordinating load balancing across heterogeneous visual experts, where optimizing one specialist's performance often compromises others' capabilities. To address task heterogeneity and expert load imbalance, we propose Astrea, a novel multi-expert collaborative VLM architecture based on progressive pre-alignment. Astrea introduces three key innovations: 1) A heterogeneous expert coordination mechanism that integrates four specialized models (detection, segmentation, classification, captioning) into a comprehensive expert matrix covering essential visual comprehension elements; 2) A dynamic knowledge fusion strategy featuring progressive pre-alignment to harmonize experts within the VLM latent space through contrastive learning, complemented by probabilistically activated stochastic residual connections to preserve knowledge continuity; 3) An enhanced optimization framework utilizing momentum contrastive learning for long-range dependency modeling and adaptive weight allocators for real-time expert contribution calibration. Extensive evaluations across 12 benchmark tasks spanning VQA, image captioning, and cross-modal retrieval demonstrate Astrea's superiority over state-of-the-art models, achieving an average performance gain of +4.7\%. This study provides the first empirical demonstration that progressive pre-alignment strategies enable VLMs to overcome task heterogeneity limitations, establishing new methodological foundations for developing general-purpose multimodal agents.

Automated fine-grained perception of calligraphy styles--a task vital to cultural heritage preservation--remains a critical challenge for Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs), largely constrained by existing datasets that suffer from modal mixture and flattened labels. To bridge this gap, we introduce HCSU, the first comprehensive dataset tailored for fine-grained Historical Calligraphy Style Understanding. HCSU comprises 39,307 meticulously curated character images from 49 historically prominent calligraphers across 10 dynasties, systematically decoupling authentic ink manuscripts (Tie) from stone rubbings (Bei) to resolve the long-standing modal mixture problem. Moving beyond conventional flattened labels, HCSU provides hierarchical expert-written aesthetic descriptions, enabling two rigorous evaluation protocols: fine-grained style discrimination and interpretable aesthetic reasoning. Extensive evaluations reveal a persistent gap between calligraphy-related knowledge and visually grounded style perception: state-of-the-art LVLMs show non-trivial performance but remain sensitive to script-level, textual, and source-specific cues, and often struggle to ground aesthetic judgments in fine-grained brushwork evidence. Ultimately, the HCSU benchmark exposes fundamental limitations in current multimodal architectures, aiming to inspire the evolution of expert-level visual reasoning for cultural heritage preservation. The dataset is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/Tongji209/HCSU.

This paper introduces BiMediX2, a bilingual (Arabic-English) Bio-Medical EXpert Large Multimodal Model (LMM) with a unified architecture that integrates text and visual modalities, enabling advanced image understanding and medical applications. BiMediX2 leverages the Llama3.1 architecture and integrates text and visual capabilities to facilitate seamless interactions in both English and Arabic, supporting text-based inputs and multi-turn conversations involving medical images. The model is trained on an extensive bilingual healthcare dataset consisting of 1.6M samples of diverse medical interactions for both text and image modalities, mixed in Arabic and English. We also propose the first bilingual GPT-4o based medical LMM benchmark named BiMed-MBench. BiMediX2 is benchmarked on both text-based and image-based tasks, achieving state-of-the-art performance across several medical benchmarks. It outperforms recent state-of-the-art models in medical LLM evaluation benchmarks. Our model also sets a new benchmark in multimodal medical evaluations with over 9% improvement in English and over 20% in Arabic evaluations. Additionally, it surpasses GPT-4 by around 9% in UPHILL factual accuracy evaluations and excels in various medical Visual Question Answering, Report Generation, and Report Summarization tasks. The project page including source code and the trained model, is available at https://github.com/mbzuai-oryx/BiMediX2.

We propose a new simulator, training approach, and policy architecture, collectively called SOUS VIDE, for end-to-end visual drone navigation. Our trained policies exhibit zero-shot sim-to-real transfer with robust real-world performance using only onboard perception and computation. Our simulator, called FiGS, couples a computationally simple drone dynamics model with a high visual fidelity Gaussian Splatting scene reconstruction. FiGS can quickly simulate drone flights producing photorealistic images at up to 130 fps. We use FiGS to collect 100k-300k image/state-action pairs from an expert MPC with privileged state and dynamics information, randomized over dynamics parameters and spatial disturbances. We then distill this expert MPC into an end-to-end visuomotor policy with a lightweight neural architecture, called SV-Net. SV-Net processes color image, optical flow and IMU data streams into low-level thrust and body rate commands at 20 Hz onboard a drone. Crucially, SV-Net includes a learned module for low-level control that adapts at runtime to variations in drone dynamics. In a campaign of 105 hardware experiments, we show SOUS VIDE policies to be robust to 30% mass variations, 40 m/s wind gusts, 60% changes in ambient brightness, shifting or removing objects from the scene, and people moving aggressively through the drone's visual field. Code, data, and experiment videos can be found on our project page: https://stanfordmsl.github.io/SousVide/.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have achieved impressive performance, but high-resolution visual inputs result in long sequences of visual tokens and substantial inference latency. Reducing redundant visual tokens is critical to ease computational/memory burdens while preserving performance, enabling MLLM deployment in resource-constrained or latency-sensitive scenarios. Current visual token pruning methods mainly rely on attention-based redundancy analysis and are tailored to dense architectures. We propose Fast Multimodal Mixture-of-Experts (FastMMoE), a training-free acceleration framework for mixture-of-experts (MoE) based MLLMs, developed from a routing analysis perspective. FastMMoE combines two complementary strategies: (i) expert activation reduction for visual tokens to minimize unnecessary expert computation; and (ii) routing-aware token pruning that leverages similarity in routing probability distributions to identify and remove highly redundant visual tokens. Experiments on large-scale MoE-MLLMs such as DeepSeek-VL2 and InternVL3.5 demonstrate that FastMMoE can reduce FLOPs by up to 55.0% while retaining approximately 95.5% of the original performance, consistently outperforming dense-model pruning baselines including FastV and SparseVLM across multiple retention rates.

Visual AutoRegressive modeling (VAR) has pioneered a coarse-to-fine multi-scale autoregressive generative paradigm, demonstrating strong capabilities in image generation. However, VAR still suffers from inherent deficiencies in multi-scale representation learning. Specifically, lower scales primarily capture global semantics, while higher scales focus on fine-grained details. Employing a shared architecture across scales induces optimization conflicts. Moreover, due to the causal autoregressive process, inaccurate semantics at early scales can propagate and significantly degrade the final output. To address these issues, we introduce a scale-aware token-routed Mixture of Experts (MoE) architecture, allowing scale-adaptive expert selection, thereby facilitating decoupled representation learning across scales. In addition, we enhance semantic modeling at early scales by incorporating external self-supervised features. Unlike naive alignment, we analyse and design a residual feature aggregation scheme tailored to the VAR paradigm. Extensive experiments show that our method significantly improves both training efficiency and generation quality. On the ImageNet 256*256 benchmark, our model achieves a superior FID compared to the dense baseline while requiring only half of the default training epochs and a smaller parameter budget, with a merely marginal increase in training cost. Moreover, the performance gap further widens with larger training epochs.

Remote Sensing Image Captioning (RSIC) presents unique challenges and plays a critical role in applications. Traditional RSIC methods often struggle to produce rich and diverse descriptions. Recently, with advancements in VLMs, efforts have emerged to integrate these models into the remote sensing domain and to introduce descriptive datasets specifically designed to enhance VLM training. This paper proposes RS-MoE, a first Mixture of Expert based VLM specifically customized for remote sensing domain. Unlike traditional MoE models, the core of RS-MoE is the MoE Block, which incorporates a novel Instruction Router and multiple lightweight Large Language Models (LLMs) as expert models. The Instruction Router is designed to generate specific prompts tailored for each corresponding LLM, guiding them to focus on distinct aspects of the RSIC task. This design not only allows each expert LLM to concentrate on a specific subset of the task, thereby enhancing the specificity and accuracy of the generated captions, but also improves the scalability of the model by facilitating parallel processing of sub-tasks. Additionally, we present a two-stage training strategy for tuning our RS-MoE model to prevent performance degradation due to sparsity. We fine-tuned our model on the RSICap dataset using our proposed training strategy. Experimental results on the RSICap dataset, along with evaluations on other traditional datasets where no additional fine-tuning was applied, demonstrate that our model achieves state-of-the-art performance in generating precise and contextually relevant captions. Notably, our RS-MoE-1B variant achieves performance comparable to 13B VLMs, demonstrating the efficiency of our model design. Moreover, our model demonstrates promising generalization capabilities by consistently achieving state-of-the-art performance on the Remote Sensing Visual Question Answering (RSVQA) task.

Vision Language Models (VLMs) are good at recognizing the global location of a photograph -- their geolocation prediction accuracy rivals the best human experts. But many VLMs are startlingly bad at explaining which image evidence led to their prediction, even when their location prediction is correct. The reasoning chains produced by VLMs frequently hallucinate scene attributes to support their location prediction (e.g. phantom writing, imagined infrastructure, misidentified flora). In this paper, we introduce the first benchmark for geolocation reasoning chains. We focus on the global location prediction task in the popular GeoGuessr game which draws from Google Street View spanning more than 100 countries. We collaborate with expert GeoGuessr players, including the reigning world champion, to produce 800 ground truth reasoning chains for 500 query scenes. These expert reasoning chains address hundreds of different discriminative visual attributes such as license plate shape, architecture, and soil properties to name just a few. We evaluate LLM-as-a-judge and VLM-as-a-judge strategies for scoring VLM-generated reasoning chains against our expert reasoning chains and find that Qwen 3 LLM-as-a-judge correlates best with human scoring. Our benchmark reveals that while large, closed-source VLMs such as Gemini and GPT 5 rival human experts at prediction locations, they still lag behind human experts when it comes to producing auditable reasoning chains. Open weights VLMs such as Llama and Qwen catastrophically fail on our benchmark -- they perform only slightly better than a baseline in which an LLM hallucinates a reasoning chain with oracle knowledge of the photo location but no visual information at all. We believe the gap between human experts and VLMs on this task points to VLM limitations at extracting fine-grained visual attributes from high resolution images.

Cardiovascular disease remains the leading cause of global mortality, with progress hindered by human interpretation of complex cardiac tests. Current AI vision-language models are limited to single-modality inputs and are non-interactive. We present MARCUS (Multimodal Autonomous Reasoning and Chat for Ultrasound and Signals), an agentic vision-language system for end-to-end interpretation of electrocardiograms (ECGs), echocardiograms, and cardiac magnetic resonance imaging (CMR) independently and as multimodal input. MARCUS employs a hierarchical agentic architecture comprising modality-specific vision-language expert models, each integrating domain-trained visual encoders with multi-stage language model optimization, coordinated by a multimodal orchestrator. Trained on 13.5 million images (0.25M ECGs, 1.3M echocardiogram images, 12M CMR images) and our novel expert-curated dataset spanning 1.6 million questions, MARCUS achieves state-of-the-art performance surpassing frontier models (GPT-5 Thinking, Gemini 2.5 Pro Deep Think). Across internal (Stanford) and external (UCSF) test cohorts, MARCUS achieves accuracies of 87-91% for ECG, 67-86% for echocardiography, and 85-88% for CMR, outperforming frontier models by 34-45% (P<0.001). On multimodal cases, MARCUS achieved 70% accuracy, nearly triple that of frontier models (22-28%), with 1.7-3.0x higher free-text quality scores. Our agentic architecture also confers resistance to mirage reasoning, whereby vision-language models derive reasoning from unintended textual signals or hallucinated visual content. MARCUS demonstrates that domain-specific visual encoders with an agentic orchestrator enable multimodal cardiac interpretation. We release our models, code, and benchmark open-source.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have shown strong performance in robotic manipulation, but often struggle in long-horizon or out-of-distribution scenarios due to the lack of explicit mechanisms for multimodal reasoning and anticipating how the world will evolve under action. Recent works introduce textual chain-of-thought or visual subgoal prediction within VLA models to reason, but still fail to offer a unified human-like reasoning framework for joint textual reasoning, visual foresight, and action prediction. To this end, we propose HALO, a unified VLA model that enables embodied multimodal chain-of-thought (EM-CoT) reasoning through a sequential process of textual task reasoning, visual subgoal prediction for fine-grained guidance, and EM-CoT-augmented action prediction. We instantiate HALO with a Mixture-of-Transformers (MoT) architecture that decouples semantic reasoning, visual foresight, and action prediction into specialized experts while allowing seamless cross-expert collaboration. To enable HALO learning at scale, we introduce an automated pipeline to synthesize EM-CoT training data along with a carefully crafted training recipe. Extensive experiments demonstrate that: (1) HALO achieves superior performance in both simulated and real-world environments, surpassing baseline policy pi_0 by 34.1% on RoboTwin benchmark; (2) all proposed components of the training recipe and EM-CoT design help improve task success rate; and (3) HALO exhibits strong generalization capabilities under aggressive unseen environmental randomization with our proposed EM-CoT reasoning.

Adapting pre-trained vision models using parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) remains challenging, as it aims to achieve performance comparable to full fine-tuning using a minimal number of trainable parameters. When applied to complex dense prediction tasks, existing methods exhibit limitations, including input-agnostic modeling and redundant cross-layer representations. To this end, we propose ParaX, a new adapter-style method featuring a simple mixture-of-experts (MoE) architecture. Specifically, we introduce shared expert centers, where each expert is a trainable parameter matrix. During a feedforward pass, each ParaX module in the network dynamically generates weight matrices tailored for the current module via a simple dynamic parameter routing mechanism, which selectively aggregates parameter matrices in the corresponding expert center. Dynamic weight matrices in ParaX modules facilitate low-rank adaptation in an input-dependent manner, thus generating more customized and powerful feature representations. Moreover, since ParaX modules across multiple network layers share the same expert center, they improve feature diversity by promoting implicit cross-layer feature interaction. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the superiority of ParaX across diverse visual recognition tasks. Code is publicly released at: https://github.com/LMMMEng/ParaX.

Reinforcement learning (RL) with dense rewards and imitation learning (IL) with human-generated trajectories are the most widely used approaches for training modern embodied agents. RL requires extensive reward shaping and auxiliary losses and is often too slow and ineffective for long-horizon tasks. While IL with human supervision is effective, collecting human trajectories at scale is extremely expensive. In this work, we show that imitating shortest-path planners in simulation produces agents that, given a language instruction, can proficiently navigate, explore, and manipulate objects in both simulation and in the real world using only RGB sensors (no depth map or GPS coordinates). This surprising result is enabled by our end-to-end, transformer-based, SPOC architecture, powerful visual encoders paired with extensive image augmentation, and the dramatic scale and diversity of our training data: millions of frames of shortest-path-expert trajectories collected inside approximately 200,000 procedurally generated houses containing 40,000 unique 3D assets. Our models, data, training code, and newly proposed 10-task benchmarking suite CHORES are available in https://spoc-robot.github.io.

This paper focuses on monolithic Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), which integrate visual encoding and language decoding into a single model. Existing structures and pre-training strategies for monolithic MLLMs often suffer from unstable optimization and catastrophic forgetting. To address these challenges, our key idea is to embed a new visual parameter space into a pre-trained LLM, enabling stable learning of visual knowledge from noisy data via delta tuning. Based on this principle, we first introduce Mono-InternVL, an advanced monolithic MLLM that incorporates a set of visual experts through a multimodal mixture-of-experts architecture. In addition, we design an innovative Endogenous Visual Pre-training (EViP) for Mono-InternVL to maximize its visual capabilities via progressive learning. Mono-InternVL achieves competitive performance against existing MLLMs but also leads to relatively expensive data cost. Therefore, we further present Mono-InternVL-1.5, a cheaper and stronger monolithic MLLM equipped with an improved EViP (EViP++). EViP++ introduces additional visual attention experts to Mono-InternVL-1.5 and re-organizes the pre-training process in an efficient manner. During inference, it includes a fused CUDA kernel to speed up its MoE operations. With these designs, Mono-InternVL-1.5 significantly reduces training and inference costs, while still maintaining competitive performance with Mono-InternVL. To evaluate our approach, we conduct extensive experiments across 15 benchmarks. Results demonstrate that Mono-InternVL outperforms existing monolithic MLLMs on 12 out of 15 benchmarks, e.g., +114-point improvement over Emu3 on OCRBench. Compared to its modular counterpart, i.e., InternVL-1.5, Mono-InternVL-1.5 achieves similar multimodal performance while reducing first-token latency by up to 69%. Code and models are released at https://github.com/OpenGVLab/Mono-InternVL.

Visual deep reinforcement learning (RL) enables robots to acquire skills from visual input for unstructured tasks. However, current algorithms suffer from low sample efficiency, limiting their practical applicability. In this work, we present MENTOR, a method that improves both the architecture and optimization of RL agents. Specifically, MENTOR replaces the standard multi-layer perceptron (MLP) with a mixture-of-experts (MoE) backbone, enhancing the agent's ability to handle complex tasks by leveraging modular expert learning to avoid gradient conflicts. Furthermore, MENTOR introduces a task-oriented perturbation mechanism, which heuristically samples perturbation candidates containing task-relevant information, leading to more targeted and effective optimization. MENTOR outperforms state-of-the-art methods across three simulation domains -- DeepMind Control Suite, Meta-World, and Adroit. Additionally, MENTOR achieves an average of 83% success rate on three challenging real-world robotic manipulation tasks including peg insertion, cable routing, and tabletop golf, which significantly surpasses the success rate of 32% from the current strongest model-free visual RL algorithm. These results underscore the importance of sample efficiency in advancing visual RL for real-world robotics. Experimental videos are available at https://suninghuang19.github.io/mentor_page.

While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) excel at general vision-language tasks, visuospatial cognition - reasoning about spatial layouts, relations, and dynamics - remains a significant challenge. Existing models often lack the necessary architectural components and specialized training data for fine-grained spatial understanding. We introduce ViCA2 (Visuospatial Cognitive Assistant 2), a novel MLLM designed to enhance spatial reasoning. ViCA2 features a dual vision encoder architecture integrating SigLIP for semantics and Hiera for spatial structure, coupled with a token ratio control mechanism for efficiency. We also developed ViCA-322K, a new large-scale dataset with over 322,000 spatially grounded question-answer pairs for targeted instruction tuning. On the challenging VSI-Bench benchmark, our ViCA2-7B model achieves a state-of-the-art average score of 56.8, significantly surpassing larger open-source models (e.g., LLaVA-NeXT-Video-72B, 40.9) and leading proprietary models (Gemini-1.5 Pro, 45.4). This demonstrates the effectiveness of our approach in achieving strong visuospatial intelligence with a compact model. We release ViCA2, its codebase, and the ViCA-322K dataset to facilitate further research.

Recent advancements in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have achieved significant multimodal generation capabilities, akin to GPT-4. These models predominantly map visual information into language representation space, leveraging the vast knowledge and powerful text generation abilities of LLMs to produce multimodal instruction-following responses. We could term this method as LLMs for Vision because of its employing LLMs for visual-language understanding, yet observe that these MLLMs neglect the potential of harnessing visual knowledge to enhance overall capabilities of LLMs, which could be regraded as Vision Enhancing LLMs. In this paper, we propose an approach called MKS2, aimed at enhancing LLMs through empowering Multimodal Knowledge Storage and Sharing in LLMs. Specifically, we introduce the Modular Visual Memory, a component integrated into the internal blocks of LLMs, designed to store open-world visual information efficiently. Additionally, we present a soft Mixtures-of-Multimodal Experts architecture in LLMs to invoke multimodal knowledge collaboration during generation. Our comprehensive experiments demonstrate that MKS2 substantially augments the reasoning capabilities of LLMs in contexts necessitating physical or commonsense knowledge. It also delivers competitive results on multimodal benchmarks.

Audio is indispensable for real-world video, yet generation models have largely overlooked audio components. Current approaches to producing audio-visual content often rely on cascaded pipelines, which increase cost, accumulate errors, and degrade overall quality. While systems such as Veo 3 and Sora 2 emphasize the value of simultaneous generation, joint multimodal modeling introduces unique challenges in architecture, data, and training. Moreover, the closed-source nature of existing systems limits progress in the field. In this work, we introduce MOVA (MOSS Video and Audio), an open-source model capable of generating high-quality, synchronized audio-visual content, including realistic lip-synced speech, environment-aware sound effects, and content-aligned music. MOVA employs a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture, with a total of 32B parameters, of which 18B are active during inference. It supports IT2VA (Image-Text to Video-Audio) generation task. By releasing the model weights and code, we aim to advance research and foster a vibrant community of creators. The released codebase features comprehensive support for efficient inference, LoRA fine-tuning, and prompt enhancement.

The visual world offers a critical axis for advancing foundation models beyond language. Despite growing interest in this direction, the design space for native multimodal models remains opaque. We provide empirical clarity through controlled, from-scratch pretraining experiments, isolating the factors that govern multimodal pretraining without interference from language pretraining. We adopt the Transfusion framework, using next-token prediction for language and diffusion for vision, to train on diverse data including text, video, image-text pairs, and even action-conditioned video. Our experiments yield four key insights: (i) Representation Autoencoder (RAE) provides an optimal unified visual representation by excelling at both visual understanding and generation; (ii) visual and language data are complementary and yield synergy for downstream capabilities; (iii) unified multimodal pretraining leads naturally to world modeling, with capabilities emerging from general training; and (iv) Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) enables efficient and effective multimodal scaling while naturally inducing modality specialization. Through IsoFLOP analysis, we compute scaling laws for both modalities and uncover a scaling asymmetry: vision is significantly more data-hungry than language. We demonstrate that the MoE architecture harmonizes this scaling asymmetry by providing the high model capacity required by language while accommodating the data-intensive nature of vision, paving the way for truly unified multimodal models.

We present HunyuanImage 3.0, a native multimodal model that unifies multimodal understanding and generation within an autoregressive framework, with its image generation module publicly available. The achievement of HunyuanImage 3.0 relies on several key components, including meticulous data curation, advanced architecture design, a native Chain-of-Thoughts schema, progressive model pre-training, aggressive model post-training, and an efficient infrastructure that enables large-scale training and inference. With these advancements, we successfully trained a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) model comprising over 80 billion parameters in total, with 13 billion parameters activated per token during inference, making it the largest and most powerful open-source image generative model to date. We conducted extensive experiments and the results of automatic and human evaluation of text-image alignment and visual quality demonstrate that HunyuanImage 3.0 rivals previous state-of-the-art models. By releasing the code and weights of HunyuanImage 3.0, we aim to enable the community to explore new ideas with a state-of-the-art foundation model, fostering a dynamic and vibrant multimodal ecosystem. All open source assets are publicly available at https://github.com/Tencent-Hunyuan/HunyuanImage-3.0

Recent advances in language and vision have demonstrated that scaling up model capacity consistently improves performance across diverse tasks. In 3D visual geometry reconstruction, large-scale training has likewise proven effective for learning versatile representations. However, further scaling of 3D models is challenging due to the complexity of geometric supervision and the diversity of 3D data. To overcome these limitations, we propose MoRE, a dense 3D visual foundation model based on a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture that dynamically routes features to task-specific experts, allowing them to specialize in complementary data aspects and enhance both scalability and adaptability. Aiming to improve robustness under real-world conditions, MoRE incorporates a confidence-based depth refinement module that stabilizes and refines geometric estimation. In addition, it integrates dense semantic features with globally aligned 3D backbone representations for high-fidelity surface normal prediction. MoRE is further optimized with tailored loss functions to ensure robust learning across diverse inputs and multiple geometric tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MoRE achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple benchmarks and supports effective downstream applications without extra computation.

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures have emerged as a powerful paradigm for scaling diffusion models in visual generation. Recent advancements have focused on adaptively allocating computational resources across diverse tokens to improve efficiency and performance. However, we identify a routing assignment problem in existing diffusion MoE frameworks: the router fails to accurately allocate more computational resources to salient tokens. Our analysis attributes this failure to the router's reliance on noise-corrupted latent features throughout the denoising process. Such stochastic noise obscures the critical structural and textural information, thereby preventing the router from effectively distinguishing salient tokens. To address this, we propose SharpMoE, a post-training framework with a saliency-harnessing accurate routing mechanism, which utilizes clean latent features as a noise-free guidance signal for routing. By bypassing the noise-distorted inputs, SharpMoE provides the router with clear saliency guidance, enabling the identification of salient tokens even in high-noise stages. Furthermore, we introduce a trajectory routing loss to constrain the compute allocation throughout the multi-step denoising trajectory, ensuring precise resource allocation along the generation rollout. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SharpMoE serves as a versatile, plug-and-play solution that further enhances the pretrained, converged MoE models, achieving state-of-the-art performance in visual generation.

Medical image segmentation using deep learning (DL) has enabled the development of automated analysis pipelines for large-scale population studies. However, state-of-the-art DL methods are prone to hallucinations, which can result in anatomically implausible segmentations. With manual correction impractical at scale, automated quality control (QC) techniques have to address the challenge. While promising, existing QC methods are organ-specific, limiting their generalizability and usability beyond their original intended task. To overcome this limitation, we propose no-new Quality Control (nnQC), a robust QC framework based on a diffusion-generative paradigm that self-adapts to any input organ dataset. Central to nnQC is a novel Team of Experts (ToE) architecture, where two specialized experts independently encode 3D spatial awareness, represented by the relative spatial position of an axial slice, and anatomical information derived from visual features from the original image. A weighted conditional module dynamically combines the pair of independent embeddings, or opinions to condition the sampling mechanism within a diffusion process, enabling the generation of a spatially aware pseudo-ground truth for predicting QC scores. Within its framework, nnQC integrates fingerprint adaptation to ensure adaptability across organs, datasets, and imaging modalities. We evaluated nnQC on seven organs using twelve publicly available datasets. Our results demonstrate that nnQC consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods across all experiments, including cases where segmentation masks are highly degraded or completely missing, confirming its versatility and effectiveness across different organs.

There has been a rapid progress in the task of Visual Question Answering with improved model architectures. Unfortunately, these models are usually computationally intensive due to their sheer size which poses a serious challenge for deployment. We aim to tackle this issue for the specific task of Visual Question Answering (VQA). A Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) is an integral part of the visual processing pipeline of a VQA model (assuming the CNN is trained along with entire VQA model). In this project, we propose an efficient and modular neural architecture for the VQA task with focus on the CNN module. Our experiments demonstrate that a sparsely activated CNN based VQA model achieves comparable performance to a standard CNN based VQA model architecture.

This paper systematically diagnoses the training failure modes of Token-Choice sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) on video Diffusion Transformers. Starting from a pretrained dense model of about 5 billion parameters, we convert it into an MoE architecture following three laws: routed experts exactly clone the original FFN weights, shared experts are initialized to zero for verification and then to extremely small non-zero noise for actual training, while only the gating networks start from random initialization. Experiments reveal a hierarchy of five failure modes: (1) linear routers suffer global soft saturation with complete expert homogenization; (2) MLP routers introduce selective deadlock, where roughly one-third of layers degenerate into a single-expert mode that cannot be prevented by increasing the auxiliary loss; (3) cross-attention routers exhibit preliminary self-recovery, yet about nine layers remain stubbornly deadlocked; (4) deadlocked layers display a U-shaped distribution, concentrated in shallow visual processing layers and deep semantic integration layers; (5) bfloat16 mixed precision causes tiny weight updates to be truncated to zero by hardware. Based on routing decision time series over 65 million tokens across 5,000 training steps, we propose the Functional Redundancy Hypothesis: deadlock is a rational waiting strategy before the shared expert matures within the gate-shared expert-routed expert triadic system. This hypothesis is supported by the theory of functional redundancy in systems biology. On the engineering side, we summarize the Three Laws of dense-to-MoE conversion and provide a complete solution for the bfloat16 precision trap. We calibrate the current capability boundary of the Token-Choice paradigm and outline a three-step evolutionary roadmap from visual unification to a world model.

Structural re-parameterization is a general training scheme for Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), which achieves performance improvement without increasing inference cost. As Vision Transformers (ViTs) are gradually surpassing CNNs in various visual tasks, one may question: if a training scheme specifically for ViTs exists that can also achieve performance improvement without increasing inference cost? Recently, Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) has attracted increasing attention, as it can efficiently scale up the capacity of Transformers at a fixed cost through sparsely activated experts. Considering that MoE can also be viewed as a multi-branch structure, can we utilize MoE to implement a ViT training scheme similar to structural re-parameterization? In this paper, we affirmatively answer these questions, with a new general training strategy for ViTs. Specifically, we decouple the training and inference phases of ViTs. During training, we replace some Feed-Forward Networks (FFNs) of the ViT with specially designed, more efficient MoEs that assign tokens to experts by random uniform partition, and perform Experts Weights Averaging (EWA) on these MoEs at the end of each iteration. After training, we convert each MoE into an FFN by averaging the experts, transforming the model back into original ViT for inference. We further provide a theoretical analysis to show why and how it works. Comprehensive experiments across various 2D and 3D visual tasks, ViT architectures, and datasets validate the effectiveness and generalizability of the proposed training scheme. Besides, our training scheme can also be applied to improve performance when fine-tuning ViTs. Lastly, but equally important, the proposed EWA technique can significantly improve the effectiveness of naive MoE in various 2D visual small datasets and 3D visual tasks.

We propose EMMA, an efficient and unified architecture for multimodal understanding, generation and editing. Specifically, EMMA primarily consists of 1) An efficient autoencoder with a 32x compression ratio, which significantly reduces the number of tokens required for generation. This also ensures the training balance between understanding and generation tasks by applying the same compression ratio to images. 2) Channel-wise concatenation instead of token-wise concatenation among visual understanding and generation tokens, which further reduces the visual tokens in unified architectures. 3) A shared-and-decoupled network that enables mutual improvements across tasks while meeting the task-specific modeling requirements. 4) A mixture-of-experts mechanism adopted for visual understanding encoder, which substantially improves perceptual capabilities with a few parameters increase. Extensive experiments have shown that EMMA-4B can significantly outperform state-of-the-art unified multimodal approaches (e.g., BAGEL-7B) in both efficiency and performance, while also achieving competitive results compared to recent multimodal understanding and generation experts (e.g., Qwen3-VL and Qwen-Image). We believe that EMMA lays a solid foundation for the future development of unified multimodal architectures.

Unifying the complementary strengths of diverse Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) into a single efficient model is highly desirable but challenged by the negative transfer inherent in monolithic distillation. To address these feature conflicts, we introduce PRISM, a novel dual-stream Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) framework that synergizes VFMs via modular specialization. We propose a two-stage paradigm: (1) expertise deconstruction, where a teacher-conditional router guides experts to specialize in distinct representational subspaces to mitigate interference, followed by (2) dynamic recomposition, where the router learns to assemble these experts into tailored computational pathways for downstream tasks. Experiments on PASCAL-Context and NYUD-v2 show that PRISM establishes a new state of the art, validating that sparse, emergent specialization is a scalable approach for integrating diverse visual knowledge.

Encoder-free multimodal large language models(MLLMs) eliminate the need for a well-trained vision encoder by directly processing image tokens before the language model. While this approach reduces computational overhead and model complexity, it often requires large amounts of training data to effectively capture the visual knowledge typically encoded by vision models like CLIP. The absence of a vision encoder implies that the model is likely to rely on substantial data to learn the necessary visual-semantic alignments. In this work, we present BREEN, a data-efficient encoder-free multimodal architecture that mitigates this issue. BREEN leverages a learnable query and image experts to achieve comparable performance with significantly less training data. The learnable query, positioned between image and text tokens, is supervised by the output of a pretrained CLIP model to distill visual knowledge, bridging the gap between visual and textual modalities. Additionally, the image expert processes image tokens and learnable queries independently, improving efficiency and reducing interference with the LLM's textual capabilities. BREEN achieves comparable performance to prior encoder-free state-of-the-art models like Mono-InternVL, using only 13 million text-image pairs in training about one percent of the data required by existing methods. Our work highlights a promising direction for data-efficient encoder-free multimodal learning, offering an alternative to traditional encoder-based approaches.

We present ZAYA1-VL-8B, a compact mixture-of-experts vision-language model built upon our in-house language model, ZAYA1-8B. Despite its compact size, ZAYA1-VL achieves performance competitive with leading base models such as Molmo2-4B and InternVL3.5-4B, while surpassing models including Qwen2.5-VL-3B, PLM-3B, and MolmoE-1B across a range of image understanding, reasoning, and counting benchmarks. The architecture incorporates two key innovations: (1) vision-specific LoRA adapters integrated into the LLM to increase modality-specific capacity without increasing the number of experts, and (2) bidirectional attention over image tokens within the LLM to enhance visual understanding. We detail the full training pipeline including data composition at each stage, sequence packing, and the attention masking scheme. The model comprises 9.2B total parameters, with 1.4B active parameters including the vision encoder, and is publicly available at https://huggingface.co/Zyphra/ZAYA1-VL.

Prevalent Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are typically built upon Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) and demonstrate exceptional proficiency in semantic understanding, but they inherently lack the capability to deduce physical world dynamics. Consequently, recent approaches have shifted toward World Models, typically formulated via video prediction; however, these methods often suffer from a lack of semantic grounding and exhibit brittleness when handling prediction errors. To synergize semantic understanding with dynamic predictive capabilities, we present InternVLA-A1. This model employs a unified Mixture-of-Transformers architecture, coordinating three experts for scene understanding, visual foresight generation, and action execution. These components interact seamlessly through a unified masked self-attention mechanism. Building upon InternVL3 and Qwen3-VL, we instantiate InternVLA-A1 at 2B and 3B parameter scales. We pre-train these models on hybrid synthetic-real datasets spanning InternData-A1 and Agibot-World, covering over 533M frames. This hybrid training strategy effectively harnesses the diversity of synthetic simulation data while minimizing the sim-to-real gap. We evaluated InternVLA-A1 across 12 real-world robotic tasks and simulation benchmark. It significantly outperforms leading models like pi0 and GR00T N1.5, achieving a 14.5\% improvement in daily tasks and a 40\%-73.3\% boost in dynamic settings, such as conveyor belt sorting.

Internet image collections containing photos captured by crowds of photographers show promise for enabling digital exploration of large-scale tourist landmarks. However, prior works focus primarily on geometric reconstruction and visualization, neglecting the key role of language in providing a semantic interface for navigation and fine-grained understanding. In constrained 3D domains, recent methods have leveraged vision-and-language models as a strong prior of 2D visual semantics. While these models display an excellent understanding of broad visual semantics, they struggle with unconstrained photo collections depicting such tourist landmarks, as they lack expert knowledge of the architectural domain. In this work, we present a localization system that connects neural representations of scenes depicting large-scale landmarks with text describing a semantic region within the scene, by harnessing the power of SOTA vision-and-language models with adaptations for understanding landmark scene semantics. To bolster such models with fine-grained knowledge, we leverage large-scale Internet data containing images of similar landmarks along with weakly-related textual information. Our approach is built upon the premise that images physically grounded in space can provide a powerful supervision signal for localizing new concepts, whose semantics may be unlocked from Internet textual metadata with large language models. We use correspondences between views of scenes to bootstrap spatial understanding of these semantics, providing guidance for 3D-compatible segmentation that ultimately lifts to a volumetric scene representation. Our results show that HaLo-NeRF can accurately localize a variety of semantic concepts related to architectural landmarks, surpassing the results of other 3D models as well as strong 2D segmentation baselines. Our project page is at https://tau-vailab.github.io/HaLo-NeRF/.

World Action Models (WAMs) improve robot policy learning by jointly modeling actions and future visual observations, using future scene evolution as dense supervision for physically grounded action generation. However, a common design in existing WAMs is to explicitly generate future videos at inference time, incurring substantial computational overhead and hindering real-time closed-loop deployment. GigaWorld-Policy addresses this issue with an action-centered formulation, where future visual dynamics are used during training while action-only decoding is used at inference time. Building upon this framework, we present GigaWorld-Policy-0.5, an enhanced action-centered WAM designed for more efficient robot control. During pretraining, GigaWorld-Policy-0.5 adopts a mixed Action-Conditioned World Modeling (AC-WM) and WAM training strategy. This strengthens the coupling between visual dynamics and robot actions and improves the transferability of action representations for downstream policy learning. For efficient inference, GigaWorld-Policy-0.5 introduces a Mixture-of-Transformers architecture that separates visual dynamics modeling and action generation into specialized experts, reducing active computation during action-only inference and achieving 85 ms inference latency on a local RTX 4090 setup. In addition, we employ an agent-based AutoResearch pipeline to systematically search training configurations, enabling more efficient identification of optimal experimental setups while reducing the time and manual intervention required for hyperparameter tuning. Experiments and ablations show that GigaWorld-Policy-0.5 preserves the training benefits of future visual dynamics while improving inference efficiency for robot control.

We introduce OneCAT, a unified multimodal model that seamlessly integrates understanding, generation, and editing within a novel, pure decoder-only transformer architecture. Our framework uniquely eliminates the need for external components such as Vision Transformers (ViT) or vision tokenizer during inference, leading to significant efficiency gains, especially for high-resolution inputs. This is achieved through a modality-specific Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) structure trained with a single autoregressive (AR) objective, which also natively supports dynamic resolutions. Furthermore, we pioneer a multi-scale visual autoregressive mechanism within the Large Language Model (LLM) that drastically reduces decoding steps compared to diffusion-based methods while maintaining state-of-the-art performance. Our findings demonstrate the powerful potential of pure autoregressive modeling as a sufficient and elegant foundation for unified multimodal intelligence. As a result, OneCAT sets a new performance standard, outperforming existing open-source unified multimodal models across benchmarks for multimodal generation, editing, and understanding.

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models embody the divide-and-conquer concept and are a promising approach for increasing model capacity, demonstrating excellent scalability across multiple domains. In this paper, we integrate the MoE structure into the classic Vision Transformer (ViT), naming it ViMoE, and explore the potential of applying MoE to vision through a comprehensive study on image classification and semantic segmentation. However, we observe that the performance is sensitive to the configuration of MoE layers, making it challenging to obtain optimal results without careful design. The underlying cause is that inappropriate MoE layers lead to unreliable routing and hinder experts from effectively acquiring helpful information. To address this, we introduce a shared expert to learn and capture common knowledge, serving as an effective way to construct stable ViMoE. Furthermore, we demonstrate how to analyze expert routing behavior, revealing which MoE layers are capable of specializing in handling specific information and which are not. This provides guidance for retaining the critical layers while removing redundancies, thereby advancing ViMoE to be more efficient without sacrificing accuracy. We aspire for this work to offer new insights into the design of vision MoE models and provide valuable empirical guidance for future research.

Architectural spatial intelligence, the ability to recognize and infer architectural space, is fundamental to tasks such as robot navigation, embodied interaction, and 3D scene understanding and generation. Although extensive research has evaluated the basic spatial skills of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) such as relative orientation, distance comparison, and object counting, these tasks cover only the most elementary levels of spatial cognition and largely overlook higher-level cognition of architectural space, including layout understanding, circulation patterns, and functional zoning. In this work, we present ArchSIBench, a Benchmark for Architectural Spatial Intelligence based on the perspectives from architecture, cognitive science, and psychology. ArchSIBench covers five core dimensions: perception, reasoning, navigation, transformation, and configuration, comprising 17 fine-grained subtasks. Through careful manual annotation by experts with architectural backgrounds, we construct 3,000 question-answer pairs to enable comprehensive evaluation of architectural spatial intelligence. Based on ArchSIBench, we evaluate various VLMs and find that the architectural spatial intelligence of most models shows significant differences from human baselines; additionally, models exhibit substantial variability across capability dimensions. Some state-of-the-art models can approach the level of human evaluators without architectural training. However, a clear gap remains compared to human evaluators with architectural training, particularly in spatial transformation and configuration reasoning. We believe that ArchSIBench will provide important insights and systematic resources for measuring and advancing the architectural spatial intelligence of VLMs. The dataset and code are available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/ArchSIBench/ArchSIBench.

Large language models have recently shown human level performance on a variety of reasoning tasks. However, the ability of these models to perform complex visual reasoning has not been studied in detail yet. A key challenge in many visual reasoning tasks is that the visual information needs to be tightly integrated in the reasoning process. We propose to address this challenge by drawing inspiration from human visual problem solving which depends on a variety of low-level visual capabilities. It can often be cast as the three step-process of ``Look, Remember, Reason'': visual information is incrementally extracted using low-level visual routines in a step-by-step fashion until a final answer is reached. We follow the same paradigm to enable existing large language models, with minimal changes to the architecture, to solve visual reasoning problems. To this end, we introduce rationales over the visual input that allow us to integrate low-level visual capabilities, such as object recognition and tracking, as surrogate tasks. We show competitive performance on diverse visual reasoning tasks from the CLEVR, CATER, and ACRE datasets over state-of-the-art models designed specifically for these tasks.

As the key component in multimodal large language models (MLLMs), the ability of the visual encoder greatly affects MLLM's understanding on diverse image content. Although some large-scale pretrained vision encoders such as vision encoders in CLIP and DINOv2 have brought promising performance, we found that there is still no single vision encoder that can dominate various image content understanding, e.g., the CLIP vision encoder leads to outstanding results on general image understanding but poor performance on document or chart content. To alleviate the bias of CLIP vision encoder, we first delve into the inherent behavior of different pre-trained vision encoders and then propose the MoVA, a powerful and novel MLLM, adaptively routing and fusing task-specific vision experts with a coarse-to-fine mechanism. In the coarse-grained stage, we design a context-aware expert routing strategy to dynamically select the most suitable vision experts according to the user instruction, input image, and expertise of vision experts. This benefits from the powerful model function understanding ability of the large language model (LLM) equipped with expert-routing low-rank adaptation (LoRA). In the fine-grained stage, we elaborately conduct the mixture-of-vision-expert adapter (MoV-Adapter) to extract and fuse task-specific knowledge from various experts. This coarse-to-fine paradigm effectively leverages representations from experts based on multimodal context and model expertise, further enhancing the generalization ability. We conduct extensive experiments to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Without any bells and whistles, MoVA can achieve significant performance gains over current state-of-the-art methods in a wide range of challenging multimodal benchmarks. Codes and models will be available at https://github.com/TempleX98/MoVA.

Computer vision systems today are primarily N-purpose systems, designed and trained for a predefined set of tasks. Adapting such systems to new tasks is challenging and often requires non-trivial modifications to the network architecture (e.g. adding new output heads) or training process (e.g. adding new losses). To reduce the time and expertise required to develop new applications, we would like to create general purpose vision systems that can learn and perform a range of tasks without any modification to the architecture or learning process. In this paper, we propose GPV-1, a task-agnostic vision-language architecture that can learn and perform tasks that involve receiving an image and producing text and/or bounding boxes, including classification, localization, visual question answering, captioning, and more. We also propose evaluations of generality of architecture, skill-concept transfer, and learning efficiency that may inform future work on general purpose vision. Our experiments indicate GPV-1 is effective at multiple tasks, reuses some concept knowledge across tasks, can perform the Referring Expressions task zero-shot, and further improves upon the zero-shot performance using a few training samples.

We introduce SAIL-VL2, an open-suite vision-language foundation model (LVM) for comprehensive multimodal understanding and reasoning. As the successor to SAIL-VL, SAIL-VL2 achieves state-of-the-art performance at the 2B and 8B parameter scales across diverse image and video benchmarks, demonstrating strong capabilities from fine-grained perception to complex reasoning. Three core innovations drive its effectiveness. First, a large-scale data curation pipeline with scoring and filtering strategies enhances both quality and distribution across captioning, OCR, QA, and video data, improving training efficiency. Second, a progressive training framework begins with a powerful pre-trained vision encoder (SAIL-ViT), advances through multimodal pre-training, and culminates in a thinking-fusion SFT-RL hybrid paradigm that systematically strengthens model capabilities. Third, architectural advances extend beyond dense LLMs to efficient sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) designs. With these contributions, SAIL-VL2 demonstrates competitive performance across 106 datasets and achieves state-of-the-art results on challenging reasoning benchmarks such as MMMU and MathVista. Furthermore, on the OpenCompass leaderboard, SAIL-VL2-2B ranks first among officially released open-source models under the 4B parameter scale, while serving as an efficient and extensible foundation for the open-source multimodal community.

Evaluating and Rethinking the current landscape of Large Multimodal Models (LMMs), we observe that widely-used visual-language projection approaches (e.g., Q-former or MLP) focus on the alignment of image-text descriptions yet ignore the visual knowledge-dimension alignment, i.e., connecting visuals to their relevant knowledge. Visual knowledge plays a significant role in analyzing, inferring, and interpreting information from visuals, helping improve the accuracy of answers to knowledge-based visual questions. In this paper, we mainly explore improving LMMs with visual-language knowledge alignment, especially aimed at challenging knowledge-based visual question answering (VQA). To this end, we present a Cognitive Visual-Language Mapper (CVLM), which contains a pretrained Visual Knowledge Aligner (VKA) and a Fine-grained Knowledge Adapter (FKA) used in the multimodal instruction tuning stage. Specifically, we design the VKA based on the interaction between a small language model and a visual encoder, training it on collected image-knowledge pairs to achieve visual knowledge acquisition and projection. FKA is employed to distill the fine-grained visual knowledge of an image and inject it into Large Language Models (LLMs). We conduct extensive experiments on knowledge-based VQA benchmarks and experimental results show that CVLM significantly improves the performance of LMMs on knowledge-based VQA (average gain by 5.0%). Ablation studies also verify the effectiveness of VKA and FKA, respectively.

Empowering Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) to deeply integrate image interaction with long-horizon reasoning capabilities remains a long-standing challenge in this field. Recent advances in vision-centric reasoning explore a promising "Thinking with Images" paradigm for LMMs, marking a shift from image-assisted reasoning to image-interactive thinking. While this milestone enables models to focus on fine-grained image regions, progress remains constrained by limited visual tool spaces and task-specific workflow designs. To bridge this gap, we present V-Thinker, a general-purpose multimodal reasoning assistant that enables interactive, vision-centric thinking through end-to-end reinforcement learning. V-Thinker comprises two key components: (1) a Data Evolution Flywheel that automatically synthesizes, evolves, and verifies interactive reasoning datasets across three dimensions-diversity, quality, and difficulty; and (2) a Visual Progressive Training Curriculum that first aligns perception via point-level supervision, then integrates interactive reasoning through a two-stage reinforcement learning framework. Furthermore, we introduce VTBench, an expert-verified benchmark targeting vision-centric interactive reasoning tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that V-Thinker consistently outperforms strong LMM-based baselines in both general and interactive reasoning scenarios, providing valuable insights for advancing image-interactive reasoning applications.

Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) has become a dominant paradigm for deploying LLMs in multi-task scenarios due to its extreme parameter efficiency. While Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) based LoRA variants have achieved promising results by dynamically routing tokens to different low-rank experts, they largely overlook the hierarchical nature of task complexity. Existing methods typically employ experts with uniform architectures, limiting their ability to capture diverse feature granularities required by distinct tasks--where some tasks demand high-level semantic abstraction while others require fine-grained syntactic manipulation. To bridge this gap, we propose Expert Pyramid Tuning (EPT), a novel architecture that integrates the multi-scale feature pyramid concept from computer vision into the realm of PEFT. Unlike standard LoRA, EPT decomposes task adaptation into two stages: (1) A shared meta-knowledge Subspace that encodes universal linguistic patterns in low dimensions; (2) A Pyramid Projection Mechanism that utilizes learnable up-projection operators to reconstruct high-dimensional features at varying scales. A task-aware router then dynamically selects the optimal combination of these multi-scale features. Extensive experiments across multiple multi-task benchmarks demonstrate that EPT significantly outperforms SOTA MoE-LoRA variants. Crucially, thanks to the re-parameterization capability of our design, EPT achieves this performance improvement while simultaneously reducing the number of training parameters.

Large language models are known to suffer from the hallucination problem in that they are prone to output statements that are false or inconsistent, indicating a lack of knowledge. A proposed solution to this is to provide the model with additional data modalities that complements the knowledge obtained through text. We investigate the use of visual data to complement the knowledge of large language models by proposing a method for evaluating visual knowledge transfer to text for uni- or multimodal language models. The method is based on two steps, 1) a novel task querying for knowledge of memory colors, i.e. typical colors of well-known objects, and 2) filtering of model training data to clearly separate knowledge contributions. Additionally, we introduce a model architecture that involves a visual imagination step and evaluate it with our proposed method. We find that our method can successfully be used to measure visual knowledge transfer capabilities in models and that our novel model architecture shows promising results for leveraging multimodal knowledge in a unimodal setting.

Generalist vision language models (VLMs) have made significant strides in computer vision, but they fall short in specialized fields like healthcare, where expert knowledge is essential. In traditional computer vision tasks, creative or approximate answers may be acceptable, but in healthcare, precision is paramount.Current large multimodal models like Gemini and GPT-4o are insufficient for medical tasks due to their reliance on memorized internet knowledge rather than the nuanced expertise required in healthcare. VLMs are usually trained in three stages: vision pre-training, vision-language pre-training, and instruction fine-tuning (IFT). IFT has been typically applied using a mixture of generic and healthcare data. In contrast, we propose that for medical VLMs, a fourth stage of specialized IFT is necessary, which focuses on medical data and includes information from domain expert models. Domain expert models developed for medical use are crucial because they are specifically trained for certain clinical tasks, e.g. to detect tumors and classify abnormalities through segmentation and classification, which learn fine-grained features of medical data-features that are often too intricate for a VLM to capture effectively especially in radiology. This paper introduces a new framework, VILA-M3, for medical VLMs that utilizes domain knowledge via expert models. Through our experiments, we show an improved state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance with an average improvement of ~9% over the prior SOTA model Med-Gemini and ~6% over models trained on the specific tasks. Our approach emphasizes the importance of domain expertise in creating precise, reliable VLMs for medical applications.

Training Large Multimodality Models (LMMs) relies on descriptive image caption that connects image and language. Existing methods either distill the caption from the LMM models or construct the captions from the internet images or by human. We propose to leverage off-the-shelf visual specialists, which were trained from annotated images initially not for image captioning, for enhancing the image caption. Our approach, named DCE, explores object low-level and fine-grained attributes (e.g., depth, emotion and fine-grained categories) and object relations (e.g., relative location and human-object-interaction (HOI)), and combine the attributes into the descriptive caption. Experiments demonstrate that such visual specialists are able to improve the performance for visual understanding tasks as well as reasoning that benefits from more accurate visual understanding. We will release the source code and the pipeline so that other visual specialists are easily combined into the pipeline. The complete source code of DCE pipeline and datasets will be available at https://github.com/syp2ysy/DCE.

The Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus (ARC) is designed to promote research on abstract reasoning, a fundamental aspect of human intelligence. Common approaches to ARC treat it as a language-oriented problem, addressed by large language models (LLMs) or recurrent reasoning models. However, although the puzzle-like tasks in ARC are inherently visual, existing research has rarely approached the problem from a vision-centric perspective. In this work, we formulate ARC within a vision paradigm, framing it as an image-to-image translation problem. To incorporate visual priors, we represent the inputs on a "canvas" that can be processed like natural images. It is then natural for us to apply standard vision architectures, such as a vanilla Vision Transformer (ViT), to perform image-to-image mapping. Our model is trained from scratch solely on ARC data and generalizes to unseen tasks through test-time training. Our framework, termed Vision ARC (VARC), achieves 60.4% accuracy on the ARC-1 benchmark, substantially outperforming existing methods that are also trained from scratch. Our results are competitive with those of leading LLMs and close the gap to average human performance.

Vision Language Models (VLMs) enable a unified model to solve various vision tasks through prompting. They have shown promising performance in semantic understanding. However, 3D understanding still largely relies on expert vision models with complex task-specific designs. The key argument this work wants to make is that VLMs are native 3D learners. Our in-depth large scale study shows that 1) focal length unification, 2) text-based pixel reference and 3) data mixture and scaling, are all you need for effective 3D learning. Model architecture changes, large models, heavy data augmentations, and complex losses including the regression formulation, many of which form the foundation of expert vision models, are actually not necessary conditions. As a result, we propose VLM3, a scalable method with the simplest design that enables standard VLMs to master diverse 3D tasks. VLM3 not only advances the VLM depth estimation accuracy by a large margin (0.84 -> 0.9), but also enables diverse 3D tasks such as pixel correspondence, camera pose estimation and object-level 3D understanding, matching expert vision model accuracy while maintaining standard architectures and text-based training. We believe VLM3 opens up a new paradigm for simple and scalable 3D learning.

Vision Transformers (ViTs) have become a dominant architecture in computer vision, yet producing stable and high-resolution attribution maps for these models remains challenging. Architectural components such as patch embeddings and attention routing often introduce structured artifacts in pixel-level explanations, causing many existing methods to rely on coarse patch-level attributions. We introduce DAVE (\underline{Distribution-aware Attribution via ViT Gradient DEcomposition)}, a mathematically grounded attribution method for ViTs based on a structured decomposition of the input gradient. By exploiting architectural properties of ViTs, DAVE isolates locally equivariant and stable components of the effective input--output mapping. It separates these from architecture-induced artifacts and other sources of instability.

Current large vision-language models (VLMs) often encounter challenges such as insufficient capabilities of a single visual component and excessively long visual tokens. These issues can limit the model's effectiveness in accurately interpreting complex visual information and over-lengthy contextual information. Addressing these challenges is crucial for enhancing the performance and applicability of VLMs. This paper proposes the use of ensemble experts technique to synergizes the capabilities of individual visual encoders, including those skilled in image-text matching, OCR, image segmentation, etc. This technique introduces a fusion network to unify the processing of outputs from different visual experts, while bridging the gap between image encoders and pre-trained LLMs. In addition, we explore different positional encoding schemes to alleviate the waste of positional encoding caused by lengthy image feature sequences, effectively addressing the issue of position overflow and length limitations. For instance, in our implementation, this technique significantly reduces the positional occupancy in models like SAM, from a substantial 4096 to a more efficient and manageable 64 or even down to 1. Experimental results demonstrate that VLMs with multiple experts exhibit consistently superior performance over isolated visual encoders and mark a significant performance boost as more experts are integrated. We have open-sourced the training code used in this report. All of these resources can be found on our project website.

Pretrained vision foundation models (VFMs) advance robotic learning via rich visual representations, yet individual VFMs typically excel only in specific domains, limiting generality across tasks. Distilling multiple VFMs into a unified representation for policy can mitigate this limitation but often yields inflexible task-specific feature selection and requires costly full re-training to incorporate robot-domain knowledge. We propose VER, a Vision Expert transformer for Robot learning. During pretraining, VER distills multiple VFMs into a vision expert library. It then fine-tunes only a lightweight routing network (fewer than 0.4% of parameters) to dynamically select task-relevant experts from the pretrained library for downstream robot tasks. We further introduce Patchwise Expert Routing with Curriculum Top-K Annealing to improve both flexibility and precision of dynamic expert selection. Moreover, VER supports parameter-efficient finetuning for scalable expert utilization and adaptive robot-domain knowledge integration. Across 17 diverse robotic tasks and multiple policy heads, VER achieves state-of-the-art performance. We find that VER reduces large-norm outliers in task-irrelevant regions (e.g., background) and concentrates on task-critical regions. Visualizations and codes can be found in https://yixiaowang7.github.io/ver_page/.

Automated neural network architecture design remains a significant challenge in computer vision. Task diversity and computational constraints require both effective architectures and efficient search methods. Large Language Models (LLMs) present a promising alternative to computationally intensive Neural Architecture Search (NAS), but their application to architecture generation in computer vision has not been systematically studied, particularly regarding prompt engineering and validation strategies. Building on the task-agnostic NNGPT/LEMUR framework, this work introduces and validates two key contributions for computer vision. First, we present Few-Shot Architecture Prompting (FSAP), the first systematic study of the number of supporting examples (n = 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6) for LLM-based architecture generation. We find that using n = 3 examples best balances architectural diversity and context focus for vision tasks. Second, we introduce Whitespace-Normalized Hash Validation, a lightweight deduplication method (less than 1 ms) that provides a 100x speedup over AST parsing and prevents redundant training of duplicate computer vision architectures. In large-scale experiments across seven computer vision benchmarks (MNIST, CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, CelebA, ImageNette, SVHN, Places365), we generated 1,900 unique architectures. We also introduce a dataset-balanced evaluation methodology to address the challenge of comparing architectures across heterogeneous vision tasks. These contributions provide actionable guidelines for LLM-based architecture search in computer vision and establish rigorous evaluation practices, making automated design more accessible to researchers with limited computational resources.

Building models that can be rapidly adapted to novel tasks using only a handful of annotated examples is an open challenge for multimodal machine learning research. We introduce Flamingo, a family of Visual Language Models (VLM) with this ability. We propose key architectural innovations to: (i) bridge powerful pretrained vision-only and language-only models, (ii) handle sequences of arbitrarily interleaved visual and textual data, and (iii) seamlessly ingest images or videos as inputs. Thanks to their flexibility, Flamingo models can be trained on large-scale multimodal web corpora containing arbitrarily interleaved text and images, which is key to endow them with in-context few-shot learning capabilities. We perform a thorough evaluation of our models, exploring and measuring their ability to rapidly adapt to a variety of image and video tasks. These include open-ended tasks such as visual question-answering, where the model is prompted with a question which it has to answer; captioning tasks, which evaluate the ability to describe a scene or an event; and close-ended tasks such as multiple-choice visual question-answering. For tasks lying anywhere on this spectrum, a single Flamingo model can achieve a new state of the art with few-shot learning, simply by prompting the model with task-specific examples. On numerous benchmarks, Flamingo outperforms models fine-tuned on thousands of times more task-specific data.

Reasoning about dynamic spatial relationships is essential, as both observers and objects often move simultaneously. Although vision-language models (VLMs) and visual expertise models excel in 2D tasks and static scenarios, their ability to fully understand dynamic 3D scenarios remains limited. We introduce Dynamic Spatial Intelligence and propose DSI-Bench, a benchmark with nearly 1,000 dynamic videos and over 1,700 manually annotated questions covering nine decoupled motion patterns of observers and objects. Spatially and temporally symmetric designs reduce biases and enable systematic evaluation of models' reasoning about self-motion and object motion. Our evaluation of 14 VLMs and expert models reveals key limitations: models often conflate observer and object motion, exhibit semantic biases, and fail to accurately infer relative relationships in dynamic scenarios. Our DSI-Bench provides valuable findings and insights about the future development of general and expertise models with dynamic spatial intelligence.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have made significant progress in bridging visual perception with high-level textual reasoning. However, they face a fundamental contradiction: while excelling at complex semantic understanding, these models often fail at basic visual tasks that require precise detail perception. This deficiency primarily stems from the prevalent architectural reliance on a single vision encoder optimized for high-level semantic alignment, which inherently sacrifices the ability to capture fine-grained visual information. To address this issue, we introduce Fusion to Enhance (FtZ), a novel vision tower framework. FtZ moves beyond the single-encoder design by innovatively composing a semantically powerful anchor encoder with a perception-rich augmenting encoder via a lightweight Multi-Head Cross-Attention mechanism. Experimental results demonstrate that on several challenging benchmarks demanding fine-grained visual understanding, such as TextVQA, POPE, MMMU, MME and MM-Vet, our FtZ model significantly outperforms baselines that use only a single encoder or existing feature fusion methods. This work proves that composing heterogeneous expert encoders is an efficient and effective path to overcoming the visual perception bottleneck in current MLLMs, offering a new design paradigm for building next-generation AI systems with stronger perceptual capabilities.

The rapid proliferation of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) is often framed as enabling unified multimodal knowledge discovery but rests on an under-examined assumption: that current VLMs faithfully synthesise multimodal data. We argue they often do not, and this gap reflects a trustworthiness problem in the dominant Vision Encoder-Projector-LLM paradigm. Rather than extracting grounded knowledge from visual inputs, state-of-the-art models frequently exhibit functional blindness, i.e., exploiting strong language priors to bypass severe visual representation bottlenecks. In this work, we challenge the conventional methodology of multimodal evaluation, which relies on data ablation or new dataset creation and therefore conflates dataset biases with architectural incapacity. We propose an information-theoretic departure: the Modality Translation Protocol, designed to quantify what we call the Expense of Seeing. By translating semantic payloads rather than ablating them, we formulate three novel metrics -- the Toll (ToS), Curse (CoS), and Fallacy (FoS) of Seeing -- culminating in the Semantic Sufficiency Criterion (SSC). Furthermore, we hypothesise a Divergence Law of Multimodal Scaling: as the underlying language engines scale to unprecedented reasoning capabilities, the penalty of the visual knowledge bottleneck may increase rather than diminish. We argue the community should move beyond "multimodal gain" as a primary evaluation target. By elevating the SSC from a passive diagnostic constraint to an active architectural blueprint, we provide a foundation for guiding the next generation of AI systems toward genuine multimodal reasoning.

We present Seed1.5-VL, a vision-language foundation model designed to advance general-purpose multimodal understanding and reasoning. Seed1.5-VL is composed with a 532M-parameter vision encoder and a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) LLM of 20B active parameters. Despite its relatively compact architecture, it delivers strong performance across a wide spectrum of public VLM benchmarks and internal evaluation suites, achieving the state-of-the-art performance on 38 out of 60 public benchmarks. Moreover, in agent-centric tasks such as GUI control and gameplay, Seed1.5-VL outperforms leading multimodal systems, including OpenAI CUA and Claude 3.7. Beyond visual and video understanding, it also demonstrates strong reasoning abilities, making it particularly effective for multimodal reasoning challenges such as visual puzzles. We believe these capabilities will empower broader applications across diverse tasks. In this report, we mainly provide a comprehensive review of our experiences in building Seed1.5-VL across model design, data construction, and training at various stages, hoping that this report can inspire further research. Seed1.5-VL is now accessible at https://www.volcengine.com/ (Volcano Engine Model ID: doubao-1-5-thinking-vision-pro-250428)

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 Reasoning Path Redundancy in visual reasoning: many visual questions do not require the full reasoning process. To address this, we propose 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.

Spatial understanding of the physical world from 2D visual inputs hinges on two complementary forms of geometric knowledge: holistic 3D structural perception and fine-grained metric scale estimation. Existing multimodal large language models (MLLMs) typically address only one facet, ingesting either depth maps or point clouds as additional model inputs, which incurs substantial computational overhead and inherits the generalization limitations of upstream prediction models. We propose GAMSI, a dual-pathway Geometry-Aware MLLM for Spatial Intelligence that takes only RGB images as input while internalizing both forms of geometric prior within a unified autoregressive backbone. Specifically, we introduce Metric-Structure Decoupled Queries (MSDQ) which employ two groups of learnable queries to respectively extract dense metric signals and sparse structural cues from the shared visual context, with a task-decoupled attention mask further preventing the two pathways from contaminating each other. Building on this, an Expert-Guided Visual Grounding (EVG) module projects the aggregated cues back to frame-level visual features and aligns them with vision foundation models, which serve purely as training-time supervision, rather than as model inputs. We further build a multi-task spatial instruction-tuning dataset (MTS) comprising 152{,}776 samples spanning 13 task types and three visual modalities, consolidated from six public datasets. Trained with a two-stage curriculum, GAMSI achieves state-of-the-art performance on seven spatial intelligence benchmarks.

Graphics design is important for various applications, including movie production and game design. To create a high-quality scene, designers usually need to spend hours in software like Blender, in which they might need to interleave and repeat operations, such as connecting material nodes, hundreds of times. Moreover, slightly different design goals may require completely different sequences, making automation difficult. In this paper, we propose a system that leverages Vision-Language Models (VLMs), like GPT-4V, to intelligently search the design action space to arrive at an answer that can satisfy a user's intent. Specifically, we design a vision-based edit generator and state evaluator to work together to find the correct sequence of actions to achieve the goal. Inspired by the role of visual imagination in the human design process, we supplement the visual reasoning capabilities of VLMs with "imagined" reference images from image-generation models, providing visual grounding of abstract language descriptions. In this paper, we provide empirical evidence suggesting our system can produce simple but tedious Blender editing sequences for tasks such as editing procedural materials from text and/or reference images, as well as adjusting lighting configurations for product renderings in complex scenes.

Vision-language models (VLMs) have advanced rapidly, but their ability to capture spatial relationships remains a blindspot. Current VLMs are typically built with contrastive language-image pretraining (CLIP) style image encoders. The training recipe often flattens images into 1D patch sequences, discarding the 2D structure necessary for spatial reasoning. We argue that this lack of spatial awareness is a missing dimension in VLM design and a bottleneck for applications requiring spatial grounding, such as robotics and embodied AI. To address this, we investigate (i) image encoders trained with alternative objectives and (ii) 2D positional encodings. Our experiments show that these architectural choices can lead to improved spatial reasoning on several benchmarks.

In this work, we introduce Libra, a prototype model with a decoupled vision system on a large language model (LLM). The decoupled vision system decouples inner-modal modeling and cross-modal interaction, yielding unique visual information modeling and effective cross-modal comprehension. Libra is trained through discrete auto-regressive modeling on both vision and language inputs. Specifically, we incorporate a routed visual expert with a cross-modal bridge module into a pretrained LLM to route the vision and language flows during attention computing to enable different attention patterns in inner-modal modeling and cross-modal interaction scenarios. Experimental results demonstrate that the dedicated design of Libra achieves a strong MLLM baseline that rivals existing works in the image-to-text scenario with merely 50 million training data, providing a new perspective for future multimodal foundation models. Code is available at https://github.com/YifanXu74/Libra.

Vision-Language (VL) models have gained significant research focus, enabling remarkable advances in multimodal reasoning. These architectures typically comprise a vision encoder, a Large Language Model (LLM), and a projection module that aligns visual features with the LLM's representation space. Despite their success, a critical limitation persists: the vision encoding process remains decoupled from user queries, often in the form of image-related questions. Consequently, the resulting visual features may not be optimally attuned to the query-specific elements of the image. To address this, we introduce QA-ViT, a Question Aware Vision Transformer approach for multimodal reasoning, which embeds question awareness directly within the vision encoder. This integration results in dynamic visual features focusing on relevant image aspects to the posed question. QA-ViT is model-agnostic and can be incorporated efficiently into any VL architecture. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of applying our method to various multimodal architectures, leading to consistent improvement across diverse tasks and showcasing its potential for enhancing visual and scene-text understanding.

Medical vision-language models (VLMs) excel at image-text understanding but typically rely on a single-pass reasoning that neglects localized visual cues. In clinical practice, however, human experts iteratively scan, focus, and refine the regions of interest before reaching a final diagnosis. To narrow this machine-human perception gap, we introduce ViTAR, a novel VLM framework that emulates the iterative reasoning process of human experts through a cognitive chain of "think-act-rethink-answer". ViTAR treats medical images as interactive objects, enabling models to engage multi-step visual reasoning. To support this approach, we curate a high-quality instruction dataset comprising 1K interactive examples that encode expert-like diagnostic behaviors. In addition, a 16K visual question answering training data has been curated towards fine-grained visual diagnosis. We introduce a two-stage training strategy that begins with supervised fine-tuning to guide cognitive trajectories, followed by the reinforcement learning to optimize decision-making. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that ViTAR outperforms strong state-of-the-art models. Visual attention analysis reveals that from the "think" to "rethink" rounds, ViTAR increasingly anchors visual grounding to clinically critical regions and maintains high attention allocation to visual tokens during reasoning, providing mechanistic insight into its improved performance. These findings demonstrate that embedding expert-style iterative thinking chains into VLMs enhances both performance and trustworthiness of medical AI.

Fine-grained image labels are desirable for many computer vision applications, such as visual search or mobile AI assistant. These applications rely on image classification models that can produce hundreds of thousands (e.g. 100K) of diversified fine-grained image labels on input images. However, training a network at this vocabulary scale is challenging, and suffers from intolerable large model size and slow training speed, which leads to unsatisfying classification performance. A straightforward solution would be training separate expert networks (specialists), with each specialist focusing on learning one specific vertical (e.g. cars, birds...). However, deploying dozens of expert networks in a practical system would significantly increase system complexity and inference latency, and consumes large amounts of computational resources. To address these challenges, we propose a Knowledge Concentration method, which effectively transfers the knowledge from dozens of specialists (multiple teacher networks) into one single model (one student network) to classify 100K object categories. There are three salient aspects in our method: (1) a multi-teacher single-student knowledge distillation framework; (2) a self-paced learning mechanism to allow the student to learn from different teachers at various paces; (3) structurally connected layers to expand the student network capacity with limited extra parameters. We validate our method on OpenImage and a newly collected dataset, Entity-Foto-Tree (EFT), with 100K categories, and show that the proposed model performs significantly better than the baseline generalist model.

We introduce MentalThink, a visual-symbolic reasoning paradigm that equips Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) with an executable mechanism for "mental" visualization. The core of MentalThink is a think-with-SVG pipeline, where the model learns to generate, render, and interpret scalable vector graphics (SVG) code as an intermediate visual representation for multi-turn reasoning. By creating structured vector sketches, the model can externalize spatial hypotheses, inspect them through deterministic rendering, and reason within a constrained geometric space, effectively mimicking the human process of mental imagery. We instantiate this paradigm through a two-stage training framework, combining Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) for SVG syntactic alignment with multi-turn Reinforcement Learning (RL) to encourage iterative inspection, revision, and refinement of intermediate visual hypotheses. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that MentalThink achieves superior performance on spatial understanding and reasoning benchmarks (e.g., 55.1% on VSIBench, 76.0% on MindCube), showing that executable vector graphics provide a verifiable visual workspace for dynamic perspective taking, visual reflection, and compositional scene construction.

The "thinking with images" paradigm represents a pivotal shift in the reasoning of Vision Language Models (VLMs), moving from text-dominant chain-of-thought to image-interactive reasoning. By invoking visual tools or generating intermediate visual representations, VLMs can iteratively attend to fine-grained regions, enabling deeper image understanding and more faithful multimodal reasoning. As an emerging paradigm, however, it still leaves substantial room for exploration in data construction accuracy, structural design, and broader application scenarios, which offer rich opportunities for advancing multimodal reasoning. To further advance this line of work, we present DeepSketcher, a comprehensive suite comprising both an image-text interleaved dataset and a self-contained model. The dataset contains 31k chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning trajectories with diverse tool calls and resulting edited images, covering a wide range of data types and manipulation instructions with high annotation accuracy. Building on this resource, we design a model that performs interleaved image-text reasoning and natively generates "visual thoughts" by operating directly in the visual embedding space, rather than invoking external tools and repeatedly re-encoding generated images. This design enables tool-free and more flexible "thinking with images". Extensive experiments on multimodal reasoning benchmarks demonstrate strong performance, validating both the utility of the dataset and the effectiveness of the model design.

Traditionally, 3D scene synthesis requires expert knowledge and significant manual effort. Automating this process could greatly benefit fields such as architectural design, robotics simulation, virtual reality, and gaming. Recent approaches to 3D scene synthesis often rely on the commonsense reasoning of large language models (LLMs) or strong visual priors of modern image generation models. However, current LLMs demonstrate limited 3D spatial reasoning ability, which restricts their ability to generate realistic and coherent 3D scenes. Meanwhile, image generation-based methods often suffer from constraints in viewpoint selection and multi-view inconsistencies. In this work, we present Video Perception models for 3D Scene synthesis (VIPScene), a novel framework that exploits the encoded commonsense knowledge of the 3D physical world in video generation models to ensure coherent scene layouts and consistent object placements across views. VIPScene accepts both text and image prompts and seamlessly integrates video generation, feedforward 3D reconstruction, and open-vocabulary perception models to semantically and geometrically analyze each object in a scene. This enables flexible scene synthesis with high realism and structural consistency. For more precise analysis, we further introduce First-Person View Score (FPVScore) for coherence and plausibility evaluation, utilizing continuous first-person perspective to capitalize on the reasoning ability of multimodal large language models. Extensive experiments show that VIPScene significantly outperforms existing methods and generalizes well across diverse scenarios. The code will be released.

We introduce LICA (Layered Image Composition Annotations), a large-scale dataset of 1,550,244 multi-layer graphic design compositions designed to advance structured understanding and generation of graphic layouts1. In addition to ren- dered PNG images, LICA represents each design as a hierarchical composition of typed components including text, image, vector, and group elements, each paired with rich per-element metadata such as spatial geometry, typographic attributes, opacity, and visibility. The dataset spans 20 design categories and 971,850 unique templates, providing broad coverage of real-world design structures. We further introduce graphic design video as a new and largely unexplored challenge for current vision-language models through 27,261 animated layouts annotated with per-component keyframes and motion parameters. Beyond scale, LICA establishes a new paradigm of research tasks for graphic design, enabling structured investiga- tions into problems such as layer-aware inpainting, structured layout generation, controlled design editing, and temporally-aware generative modeling. By repre- senting design as a system of compositional layers and relationships, the dataset supports research on models that operate directly on design structure rather than pixels alone.

While editing directly from life, photographers have found it too difficult to see simultaneously both the blue and the sky. Photographer and curator, Szarkowski insightfully revealed one of the notable gaps between general and aesthetic visual understanding: while the former focuses on identifying the factual element in an image (sky), the latter transcends such object identification, viewing it instead as an aesthetic component--a pure color block (blue). Such fundamental distinctions between general (detection, localization, etc.) and aesthetic (color, lighting, composition, etc.) visual understanding present a significant challenge for Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). Although some recent works have made initial explorations, they are often limited to general and basic aesthetic commonsense. As a result, they frequently fall short in real-world scenarios (Fig. 1), which require extensive expertise--including photographic techniques, photo pre/post-processing knowledge, and more, to provide a detailed analysis and description. To fundamentally enhance the aesthetics understanding of MLLMs, we first introduce a novel dataset, PhotoCritique, derived from extensive discussions among professional photographers and enthusiasts, and characterized by the large scale, expertise, and diversity. Then, to better learn visual aesthetics from PhotoCritique, we furthur propose a novel model, PhotoEye, featuring a languageguided multi-view vision fusion mechanism to understand image aesthetics from multiple perspectives. Finally, we present a novel benchmark, PhotoBench, a comprehensive and professional benchmark for aesthetic visual understanding. On existing benchmarks and PhotoBench, our model demonstrates clear advantages over existing models.

The multi-modal nature of many vision problems calls for neural network architectures that can perform multiple tasks concurrently. Typically, such architectures have been handcrafted in the literature. However, given the size and complexity of the problem, this manual architecture exploration likely exceeds human design abilities. In this paper, we propose a principled approach, rooted in differentiable neural architecture search, to automatically define branching (tree-like) structures in the encoding stage of a multi-task neural network. To allow flexibility within resource-constrained environments, we introduce a proxyless, resource-aware loss that dynamically controls the model size. Evaluations across a variety of dense prediction tasks show that our approach consistently finds high-performing branching structures within limited resource budgets.

Mixture-of-Experts(MoE) Vision-Language Models (VLMs) offer remarkable performance but incur prohibitive memory and computational costs, making compression essential. Post-Training Quantization (PTQ) is an effective training-free technique to address the massive memory and computation overhead. Existing quantization paradigms fall short as they are oblivious to two critical forms of heterogeneity: the inherent discrepancy between vision and language tokens, and the non-uniform contribution of different experts. To bridge this gap, we propose Visual Expert Quantization (VEQ), a dual-aware quantization framework designed to simultaneously accommodate cross-modal differences and heterogeneity between experts. Specifically, VEQ incorporates 1)Modality-expert-aware Quantization, which utilizes expert activation frequency to prioritize error minimization for pivotal experts, and 2)Modality-affinity-aware Quantization, which constructs an enhanced Hessian matrix by integrating token-expert affinity with modality information to guide the calibration process. Extensive experiments across diverse benchmarks verify that VEQ consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines. Specifically, under the W3A16 configuration, our method achieves significant average accuracy gains of 2.04\% on Kimi-VL and 3.09\% on Qwen3-VL compared to the previous SOTA quantization methods, demonstrating superior robustness across various multimodal tasks. Our code will be available at https://github.com/guangshuoqin/VEQ.

While recent Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) exhibit strong multimodal reasoning abilities, they often produce ungrounded or hallucinated responses because they rely too heavily on linguistic priors instead of visual evidence. This limitation highlights the absence of a quantitative measure of how much these models actually use visual information during reasoning. We propose Draft and Refine (DnR), an agent framework driven by a question-conditioned utilization metric. The metric quantifies the model's reliance on visual evidence by first constructing a query-conditioned relevance map to localize question-specific cues and then measuring dependence through relevance-guided probabilistic masking. Guided by this metric, the DnR agent refines its initial draft using targeted feedback from external visual experts. Each expert's output (such as boxes or masks) is rendered as visual cues on the image, and the model is re-queried to select the response that yields the largest improvement in utilization. This process strengthens visual grounding without retraining or architectural changes. Experiments across VQA and captioning benchmarks show consistent accuracy gains and reduced hallucination, demonstrating that measuring visual utilization provides a principled path toward more interpretable and evidence-driven multimodal agent systems.

Visual reasoning refers to the task of solving questions about visual information. Current visual reasoning methods typically employ pre-trained vision-language model (VLM) strategies or deep neural network approaches. However, existing efforts are constrained by limited reasoning interpretability, while hindering by the phenomenon of underspecification in the question text. Additionally, the absence of fine-grained visual knowledge limits the precise understanding of subject behavior in visual reasoning tasks. To address these issues, we propose VIKSER (Visual Knowledge-Driven Self-Reinforcing Reasoning Framework). Specifically, VIKSER, trained using knowledge distilled from large language models, extracts fine-grained visual knowledge with the assistance of visual relationship detection techniques. Subsequently, VIKSER utilizes fine-grained visual knowledge to paraphrase the question with underspecification. Additionally, we design a novel prompting method called Chain-of-Evidence (CoE), which leverages the power of ``evidence for reasoning'' to endow VIKSER with interpretable reasoning capabilities. Meanwhile, the integration of self-reflection technology empowers VIKSER with the ability to learn and improve from its mistakes. Experiments conducted on widely used datasets demonstrate that VIKSER achieves new state-of-the-art (SOTA) results in relevant tasks.

We present a novel methodology aimed at optimizing the application of frozen large language models (LLMs) for resource-intensive vision-language (VL) pre-training. The current paradigm uses visual features as prompts to guide language models, with a focus on determining the most relevant visual features for corresponding text. Our approach diverges by concentrating on the language component, specifically identifying the optimal prompts to align with visual features. We introduce the Prompt-Transformer (P-Former), a model that predicts these ideal prompts, which is trained exclusively on linguistic data, bypassing the need for image-text pairings. This strategy subtly bifurcates the end-to-end VL training process into an additional, separate stage. Our experiments reveal that our framework significantly enhances the performance of a robust image-to-text baseline (BLIP-2), and effectively narrows the performance gap between models trained with either 4M or 129M image-text pairs. Importantly, our framework is modality-agnostic and flexible in terms of architectural design, as validated by its successful application in a video learning task using varied base modules. The code is available at https://github.com/yiren-jian/BLIText

Solving complex visual tasks such as "Who invented the musical instrument on the right?" involves a composition of skills: understanding space, recognizing instruments, and also retrieving prior knowledge. Recent work shows promise by decomposing such tasks using a large language model (LLM) into an executable program that invokes specialized vision models. However, generated programs are error-prone: they omit necessary steps, include spurious ones, and are unable to recover when the specialized models give incorrect outputs. Moreover, they require loading multiple models, incurring high latency and computation costs. We propose Visual Program Distillation (VPD), an instruction tuning framework that produces a vision-language model (VLM) capable of solving complex visual tasks with a single forward pass. VPD distills the reasoning ability of LLMs by using them to sample multiple candidate programs, which are then executed and verified to identify a correct one. It translates each correct program into a language description of the reasoning steps, which are then distilled into a VLM. Extensive experiments show that VPD improves the VLM's ability to count, understand spatial relations, and reason compositionally. Our VPD-trained PaLI-X outperforms all prior VLMs, achieving state-of-the-art performance across complex vision tasks, including MMBench, OK-VQA, A-OKVQA, TallyQA, POPE, and Hateful Memes. An evaluation with human annotators also confirms that VPD improves model response factuality and consistency. Finally, experiments on content moderation demonstrate that VPD is also helpful for adaptation to real-world applications with limited data.

We present SOLO, a single transformer for Scalable visiOn-Language mOdeling. Current large vision-language models (LVLMs) such as LLaVA mostly employ heterogeneous architectures that connect pre-trained visual encoders with large language models (LLMs) to facilitate visual recognition and complex reasoning. Although achieving remarkable performance with relatively lightweight training, we identify four primary scalability limitations: (1) The visual capacity is constrained by pre-trained visual encoders, which are typically an order of magnitude smaller than LLMs. (2) The heterogeneous architecture complicates the use of established hardware and software infrastructure. (3) Study of scaling laws on such architecture must consider three separate components - visual encoder, connector, and LLMs, which complicates the analysis. (4) The use of existing visual encoders typically requires following a pre-defined specification of image inputs pre-processing, for example, by reshaping inputs to fixed-resolution square images, which presents difficulties in processing and training on high-resolution images or those with unusual aspect ratio. A unified single Transformer architecture, like SOLO, effectively addresses these scalability concerns in LVLMs; however, its limited adoption in the modern context likely stems from the absence of reliable training recipes that balance both modalities and ensure stable training for billion-scale models. In this paper, we introduce the first open-source training recipe for developing SOLO, an open-source 7B LVLM using moderate academic resources. The training recipe involves initializing from LLMs, sequential pre-training on ImageNet and web-scale data, and instruction fine-tuning on our curated high-quality datasets. On extensive evaluation, SOLO demonstrates performance comparable to LLaVA-v1.5-7B, particularly excelling in visual mathematical reasoning.

Video-based spatial cognition is vital for robotics and embodied AI but challenges current Vision-Language Models (VLMs). This paper makes two key contributions. First, we introduce ViCA (Visuospatial Cognitive Assistant)-322K, a diverse dataset of 322,003 QA pairs from real-world indoor videos (ARKitScenes, ScanNet, ScanNet++), offering supervision for 3D metadata-grounded queries and video-based complex reasoning. Second, we develop ViCA-7B, fine-tuned on ViCA-322K, which achieves new state-of-the-art on all eight VSI-Bench tasks, outperforming existing models, including larger ones (e.g., +26.1 on Absolute Distance). For interpretability, we present ViCA-Thinking-2.68K, a dataset with explicit reasoning chains, and fine-tune ViCA-7B to create ViCA-7B-Thinking, a model that articulates its spatial reasoning. Our work highlights the importance of targeted data and suggests paths for improved temporal-spatial modeling. We release all resources to foster research in robust visuospatial intelligence.

Spatial perception and reasoning are crucial for Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models to accomplish fine-grained manipulation tasks. However, existing approaches often lack the ability to understand and reason over the essential 3D structures necessary for precise control. To address this limitation, we propose QDepth-VLA, a general framework that augments VLA models with an auxiliary depth prediction task. A dedicated depth expert is designed to predict quantized latent tokens of depth maps obtained from a VQ-VAE encoder, enabling the model to learn depth-aware representations that capture critical geometric cues. Experimental results on the simulation benchmarks and real-world tasks demonstrate that QDepth-VLA yields strong spatial reasoning and competitive performance on manipulation tasks.

While vision-language models (VLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance across various tasks combining textual and visual information, they continue to struggle with fine-grained visual perception tasks that require detailed pixel-level analysis. Effectively eliciting comprehensive reasoning from VLMs on such intricate visual elements remains an open challenge. In this paper, we present VipAct, an agent framework that enhances VLMs by integrating multi-agent collaboration and vision expert models, enabling more precise visual understanding and comprehensive reasoning. VipAct consists of an orchestrator agent, which manages task requirement analysis, planning, and coordination, along with specialized agents that handle specific tasks such as image captioning and vision expert models that provide high-precision perceptual information. This multi-agent approach allows VLMs to better perform fine-grained visual perception tasks by synergizing planning, reasoning, and tool use. We evaluate VipAct on benchmarks featuring a diverse set of visual perception tasks, with experimental results demonstrating significant performance improvements over state-of-the-art baselines across all tasks. Furthermore, comprehensive ablation studies reveal the critical role of multi-agent collaboration in eliciting more detailed System-2 reasoning and highlight the importance of image input for task planning. Additionally, our error analysis identifies patterns of VLMs' inherent limitations in visual perception, providing insights into potential future improvements. VipAct offers a flexible and extensible framework, paving the way for more advanced visual perception systems across various real-world applications.

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance across multi-modal tasks by scaling model size and training data. However, these dense LVLMs incur significant computational costs and motivate the exploration of sparse Mixture of Experts (MoE) architectures. While MoE improve parameter efficiency, effectively applying MoE to simultaneously model modality-specific features and cross-modal associations in LVLMs remains challenging. In this work, we propose to incorporate Mixture of Intra- and Inter-Modality Experts (MoIIE) to LVLMs. For each token, expert routing is guided by its modality, directing tokens to their respective intra-modality experts as well as a shared pool of inter-modality experts, enabling the model to jointly learn rich intra-modal features and cross-modal interactions. We further introduce an effective and straightforward two-stage training strategy, which facilitates the direct activation of both MoE and multi-modal capabilities. Extensive experiments across different data scales and LLM backbone demonstrate the effectiveness, efficiency and generality of our approach. Notably, our MoIIE models with 5.5B and 11.3B activated parameters match or even surpass the performance of existing advanced open-source MoE-LLMs based multi-modal models that involve more activated parameters. The code is available at https://github.com/AlenjandroWang/MoIIE.

Significant advancements in the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) are now driven by test-time scaling laws, particularly those leveraging extended Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning. Inspired by these breakthroughs, researchers have extended these paradigms to Large Multimodal Models (LMMs). However, a critical limitation emerges: as their reasoning chains extend, LMMs increasingly rely on textual logic, progressively losing grounding in the underlying visual information. This leads to reasoning paths that diverge from the image content, culminating in erroneous conclusions. To address this, we introduce a strikingly simple yet effective training-free visual-reasoning pipeline. The core concept is to decouple the reasoning and perception processes. A powerful LLM orchestrates the high-level reasoning, strategically interrogating a LMM to extract specific visual information required for its logical chain. The LMM, in turn, functions exclusively as a visual question-answering engine, supplying the necessary perceptual details on demand. This lightweight, plug-and-play approach requires no additional training or architectural changes. Comprehensive evaluations validate that our framework effectively governs the visual reasoning process, leading to a significant reduction in visually-unfounded reasoning steps and a substantial improvement in reasoning fidelity.

Building general-purpose models that can effectively perceive the world through multimodal signals has been a long-standing goal. Current approaches involve integrating separately pre-trained components, such as connecting vision encoders to LLMs and continuing multimodal training. While such approaches exhibit remarkable sample efficiency, it remains an open question whether such late-fusion architectures are inherently superior. In this work, we revisit the architectural design of native multimodal models (NMMs)--those trained from the ground up on all modalities--and conduct an extensive scaling laws study, spanning 457 trained models with different architectures and training mixtures. Our investigation reveals no inherent advantage to late-fusion architectures over early-fusion ones, which do not rely on image encoders. On the contrary, early-fusion exhibits stronger performance at lower parameter counts, is more efficient to train, and is easier to deploy. Motivated by the strong performance of the early-fusion architectures, we show that incorporating Mixture of Experts (MoEs) allows for models that learn modality-specific weights, significantly enhancing performance.

While Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have made significant progress, they remain largely text-centric, relying on language as their core reasoning modality. As a result, they are limited in their ability to handle reasoning tasks that are predominantly visual. Recent approaches have sought to address this by supervising intermediate visual steps with helper images, depth maps, or image crops. However, these strategies impose restrictive priors on what "useful" visual abstractions look like, add heavy annotation costs, and struggle to generalize across tasks. To address this critical limitation, we propose a task-agnostic mechanism that trains LMMs to discover and use visual reasoning tokens without explicit supervision. These tokens attend globally and re-encode the image in a task-adaptive way, enabling the model to extract relevant visual information without hand-crafted supervision. Our approach outperforms direct fine-tuning and achieves state-of-the-art results on a diverse range of vision-centric tasks -- including those where intermediate abstractions are hard to specify -- while also generalizing to multi-task instruction tuning.

Recent advancements in Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have significantly enhanced their ability to integrate visual and linguistic information, achieving near-human proficiency in tasks like object recognition, captioning, and visual question answering. However, current benchmarks typically focus on knowledge-centric evaluations that assess domain-specific expertise, often neglecting the core ability to reason about fundamental mathematical elements and visual concepts. We identify a gap in evaluating elementary-level math problems, which rely on explicit visual dependencies-requiring models to discern, integrate, and reason across multiple images while incorporating commonsense knowledge, all of which are crucial for advancing toward broader AGI capabilities. To address this gap, we introduce VCBENCH, a comprehensive benchmark for multimodal mathematical reasoning with explicit visual dependencies. VCBENCH includes 1,720 problems across six cognitive domains, featuring 6,697 images (averaging 3.9 per question) to ensure multi-image reasoning. We evaluate 26 state-of-the-art LVLMs on VCBENCH, revealing substantial performance disparities, with even the top models unable to exceed 50% accuracy. Our findings highlight the ongoing challenges in visual-mathematical integration and suggest avenues for future LVLM advancements.

The emergence of multimodal large models (MLMs) has significantly advanced the field of visual understanding, offering remarkable capabilities in the realm of visual question answering (VQA). Yet, the true challenge lies in the domain of knowledge-intensive VQA tasks, which necessitate not just recognition of visual elements, but also a deep comprehension of the visual information in conjunction with a vast repository of learned knowledge. To uncover such capabilities of MLMs, particularly the newly introduced GPT-4V and Gemini, we provide an in-depth evaluation from three perspectives: 1) Commonsense Knowledge, which assesses how well models can understand visual cues and connect to general knowledge; 2) Fine-grained World Knowledge, which tests the model's skill in reasoning out specific knowledge from images, showcasing their proficiency across various specialized fields; 3) Comprehensive Knowledge with Decision-making Rationales, which examines model's capability to provide logical explanations for its inference, facilitating a deeper analysis from the interpretability perspective. Additionally, we utilize a visual knowledge-enhanced training strategy and multimodal retrieval-augmented generation approach to enhance MLMs, highlighting the future need for advancements in this research direction. Extensive experiments indicate that: a) GPT-4V demonstrates enhanced explanation generation when using composite images as few-shots; b) GPT-4V and other MLMs produce severe hallucinations when dealing with world knowledge; c) Visual knowledge enhanced training and prompting technicals present potential to improve performance. Codes: https://github.com/HITsz-TMG/Cognitive-Visual-Language-Mapper

Large vision-language models (LVLMs) have witnessed significant progress on visual understanding tasks. However, they often prioritize language knowledge over image information on visual reasoning tasks, incurring performance degradation. To tackle this issue, we first identify the drawbacks of existing solutions (i.e., insufficient and irrelevant visual descriptions, and limited multi-modal capacities). We then decompose visual reasoning process into two stages: visual perception (i.e., eyesight) and textual reasoning (i.e., wisdom), and introduce a novel visual reasoning framework named ProReason. This framework features multi-run proactive perception and decoupled vision-reasoning capabilities. Briefly, given a multi-modal question, ProReason iterates proactive information collection and reasoning until the answer can be concluded with necessary and sufficient visual descriptions. Notably, the disassociation of capabilities allows seamless integration of existing large language models (LLMs) to compensate for the reasoning deficits of LVLMs. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that ProReason outperforms both existing multi-step reasoning frameworks and passive peer methods on a wide range of benchmarks for both open-source and closed-source models. In addition, with the assistance of LLMs, ProReason achieves a performance improvement of up to 15% on MMMU benchmark. Our insights into existing solutions and the decoupled perspective for feasible integration of LLMs illuminate future research on visual reasoning techniques, especially LLM-assisted ones.

Visual planning represents a crucial facet of human intelligence, especially in tasks that require complex spatial reasoning and navigation. Yet, in machine learning, this inherently visual problem is often tackled through a verbal-centric lens. While recent research demonstrates the promise of fully visual approaches, they suffer from significant computational inefficiency due to the step-by-step planning-by-generation paradigm. In this work, we present EAR, an editing-as-reasoning paradigm that reformulates visual planning as a single-step image transformation. To isolate intrinsic reasoning from visual recognition, we employ abstract puzzles as probing tasks and introduce AMAZE, a procedurally generated dataset that features the classical Maze and Queen problems, covering distinct, complementary forms of visual planning. The abstract nature of AMAZE also facilitates automatic evaluation of autoregressive and diffusion-based models in terms of both pixel-wise fidelity and logical validity. We assess leading proprietary and open-source editing models. The results show that they all struggle in the zero-shot setting, finetuning on basic scales enables remarkable generalization to larger in-domain scales and out-of-domain scales and geometries. However, our best model that runs on high-end hardware fails to match the zero-shot efficiency of human solvers, highlighting a persistent gap in neural visual reasoning.

In recent times there has been a surge of multi-modal architectures based on Large Language Models, which leverage the zero shot generation capabilities of LLMs and project image embeddings into the text space and then use the auto-regressive capacity to solve tasks such as VQA, captioning, and image retrieval. We name these architectures as "bridge-architectures" as they project from the image space to the text space. These models deviate from the traditional recipe of training transformer based multi-modal models, which involve using large-scale pre-training and complex multi-modal interactions through co or cross attention. However, the capabilities of bridge architectures have not been tested on complex visual reasoning tasks which require fine grained analysis about the image. In this project, we investigate the performance of these bridge-architectures on the NLVR2 dataset, and compare it to state-of-the-art transformer based architectures. We first extend the traditional bridge architectures for the NLVR2 dataset, by adding object level features to faciliate fine-grained object reasoning. Our analysis shows that adding object level features to bridge architectures does not help, and that pre-training on multi-modal data is key for good performance on complex reasoning tasks such as NLVR2. We also demonstrate some initial results on a recently bridge-architecture, LLaVA, in the zero shot setting and analyze its performance.

Current large vision-language models (LVLMs) typically rely on text-only reasoning based on a single-pass visual encoding, which often leads to loss of fine-grained visual information. Recently the proposal of ''thinking with images'' attempts to alleviate this limitation by manipulating images via external tools or code; however, the resulting visual states are often insufficiently grounded in linguistic semantics, impairing effective cross-modal alignment - particularly when visual semantics or geometric relationships must be reasoned over across distant regions or multiple images. To address these challenges, we propose ''chatting with images'', a new framework that reframes visual manipulation as language-guided feature modulation. Under the guidance of expressive language prompts, the model dynamically performs joint re-encoding over multiple image regions, enabling tighter coupling between linguistic reasoning and visual state updates. We instantiate this paradigm in ViLaVT, a novel LVLM equipped with a dynamic vision encoder explicitly designed for such interactive visual reasoning, and trained it with a two-stage curriculum combining supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning to promote effective reasoning behaviors. Extensive experiments across eight benchmarks demonstrate that ViLaVT achieves strong and consistent improvements, with particularly pronounced gains on complex multi-image and video-based spatial reasoning tasks.

Graphic design often involves exploring different stylistic directions, which can be time-consuming for non-experts. We address this problem of stylistically improving designs based on natural language instructions. While VLMs have shown initial success in graphic design, their pretrained knowledge on styles is often too general and misaligned with specific domain data. For example, VLMs may associate minimalism with abstract designs, whereas designers emphasize shape and color choices. Our key insight is to leverage design data -- a collection of real-world designs that implicitly capture designer's principles -- to learn design knowledge and guide stylistic improvement. We propose PRISM (PRior-Informed Stylistic Modification) that constructs and applies a design knowledge base through three stages: (1) clustering high-variance designs to capture diversity within a style, (2) summarizing each cluster into actionable design knowledge, and (3) retrieving relevant knowledge during inference to enable style-aware improvement. Experiments on the Crello dataset show that PRISM achieves the highest average rank of 1.49 (closer to 1 is better) over baselines in style alignment. User studies further validate these results, showing that PRISM is consistently preferred by designers.

Advancing machine visual reasoning requires a deeper understanding of how Vision-Language Models (VLMs) process and interpret complex visual patterns. This work introduces a novel, cognitively-inspired evaluation framework to systematically analyze VLM reasoning on natural image-based Bongard Problems. We propose three structured paradigms -- Direct Visual Rule Learning, Deductive Rule Learning, and Componential Analysis -- designed to progressively enforce step-wise reasoning and disentangle the interplay between perception and reasoning. Our evaluation shows that advanced, closed-source VLMs (GPT-4o and Gemini 2.0) achieve near-superhuman performance, particularly when provided with high-quality image descriptions, while open-source models exhibit a significant performance bottleneck due to deficiencies in perception. An ablation study further confirms that perception, rather than reasoning, is the primary limiting factor, as open-source models apply extracted rules effectively when given accurate descriptions. These findings underscore the critical role of robust multimodal perception in enhancing generalizable visual reasoning and highlight the importance of structured, step-wise reasoning paradigms for advancing machine intelligence.

Compositional visual reasoning has emerged as a key research frontier in multimodal AI, aiming to endow machines with the human-like ability to decompose visual scenes, ground intermediate concepts, and perform multi-step logical inference. While early surveys focus on monolithic vision-language models or general multimodal reasoning, a dedicated synthesis of the rapidly expanding compositional visual reasoning literature is still missing. We fill this gap with a comprehensive survey spanning 2023 to 2025 that systematically reviews 260+ papers from top venues (CVPR, ICCV, NeurIPS, ICML, ACL, etc.). We first formalize core definitions and describe why compositional approaches offer advantages in cognitive alignment, semantic fidelity, robustness, interpretability, and data efficiency. Next, we trace a five-stage paradigm shift: from prompt-enhanced language-centric pipelines, through tool-enhanced LLMs and tool-enhanced VLMs, to recently minted chain-of-thought reasoning and unified agentic VLMs, highlighting their architectural designs, strengths, and limitations. We then catalog 60+ benchmarks and corresponding metrics that probe compositional visual reasoning along dimensions such as grounding accuracy, chain-of-thought faithfulness, and high-resolution perception. Drawing on these analyses, we distill key insights, identify open challenges (e.g., limitations of LLM-based reasoning, hallucination, a bias toward deductive reasoning, scalable supervision, tool integration, and benchmark limitations), and outline future directions, including world-model integration, human-AI collaborative reasoning, and richer evaluation protocols. By offering a unified taxonomy, historical roadmap, and critical outlook, this survey aims to serve as a foundational reference and inspire the next generation of compositional visual reasoning research.

In recent years, multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable progress, primarily attributed to effective paradigms for integrating visual and textual information. The dominant connector-based paradigm projects visual features into textual sequence, enabling unified multimodal alignment and reasoning within a generative architecture. However, our experiments reveal two key limitations: (1) Although visual information serves as the core evidential modality in MLLMs, it is treated on par with textual tokens, diminishing the unique contribution of the visual modality; (2) As generation length increases, particularly within a limited context window, the model's dependence on visual information progressively weakens, resulting in deteriorated vision-language alignment and reduced consistency between generated content and visual semantics. To address these challenges, we propose the Vision Inference Former (VIF), a lightweight architectural module that establishes a direct bridge between pure visual representations and the model's output space. Specifically, VIF continuously injects visual semantics throughout the decoding phase of the inference process, ensuring that the model remains firmly grounded in visual content during generation. We conduct experiments on 14 benchmark tasks covering general reasoning, OCR, table understanding, vision-centric evaluation, and hallucination. Experimental results show that VIF consistently improves model performance across diverse architectures while introducing minimal additional overhead. The code for this work is available at https://github.com/Dong-Xinpeng/VIF.

Modern computer vision is converging on a closed loop in which perception, reasoning and generation mutually reinforce each other. However, this loop remains incomplete: the top-down influence of high-level reasoning on the foundational learning of low-level perceptual features is not yet underexplored. This paper addresses this gap by proposing a new paradigm for pretraining foundation models in downstream domains. We introduce Visual insTruction Pretraining (ViTP), a novel approach that directly leverages reasoning to enhance perception. ViTP embeds a Vision Transformer (ViT) backbone within a Vision-Language Model and pretrains it end-to-end using a rich corpus of visual instruction data curated from target downstream domains. ViTP is powered by our proposed Visual Robustness Learning (VRL), which compels the ViT to learn robust and domain-relevant features from a sparse set of visual tokens. Extensive experiments on 16 challenging remote sensing and medical imaging benchmarks demonstrate that ViTP establishes new state-of-the-art performance across a diverse range of downstream tasks. The code is available at github.com/zcablii/ViTP.

Creating visually appealing advertising images is often a labor-intensive and time-consuming process. Is it possible to automatically generate such images using only basic product information--specifically, a product foreground image, taglines, and a target size? Existing methods mainly focus on parts of the problem and fail to provide a comprehensive solution. To address this gap, we propose a novel multistage framework called Product-Centric Advertising Image Design (PAID). It consists of four sequential stages to highlight product foregrounds and taglines while achieving overall image aesthetics: prompt generation, layout generation, background image generation, and graphics rendering. Different expert models are designed and trained for the first three stages: First, we use a visual language model (VLM) to generate background prompts that match the products. Next, a VLM-based layout generation model arranges the placement of product foregrounds, graphic elements (taglines and decorative underlays), and various nongraphic elements (objects from the background prompt). Following this, we train an SDXL-based image generation model that can simultaneously accept prompts, layouts, and foreground controls. To support the PAID framework, we create corresponding datasets with over 50,000 labeled images. Extensive experimental results and online A/B tests demonstrate that PAID can produce more visually appealing advertising images.

Capturing spatial relationships from visual inputs is a cornerstone of human-like general intelligence. Several previous studies have tried to enhance the spatial awareness of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) by adding extra expert encoders, which brings extra overhead and usually harms general capabilities. To enhance the spatial ability in general architectures, we introduce Visual Spatial Tuning (VST), a comprehensive framework to cultivate VLMs with human-like visuospatial abilities, from spatial perception to reasoning. We first attempt to enhance spatial perception in VLMs by constructing a large-scale dataset termed VST-P, which comprises 4.1 million samples spanning 19 skills across single views, multiple images, and videos. Then, we present VST-R, a curated dataset with 135K samples that instruct models to reason in space. In particular, we adopt a progressive training pipeline: supervised fine-tuning to build foundational spatial knowledge, followed by reinforcement learning to further improve spatial reasoning abilities. Without the side-effect to general capabilities, the proposed VST consistently achieves state-of-the-art results on several spatial benchmarks, including 34.8% on MMSI-Bench and 61.2% on VSIBench. It turns out that the Vision-Language-Action models can be significantly enhanced with the proposed spatial tuning paradigm, paving the way for more physically grounded AI.

The Mixture of Experts (MoE) architecture has excelled in Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs), yet its potential in real-time open-vocabulary object detectors, which also leverage large-scale vision-language datasets but smaller models, remains unexplored. This work investigates this domain, revealing intriguing insights. In the shallow layers, experts tend to cooperate with diverse peers to expand the search space. While in the deeper layers, fixed collaborative structures emerge, where each expert maintains 2-3 fixed partners and distinct expert combinations are specialized in processing specific patterns. Concretely, we propose Dynamic-DINO, which extends Grounding DINO 1.5 Edge from a dense model to a dynamic inference framework via an efficient MoE-Tuning strategy. Additionally, we design a granularity decomposition mechanism to decompose the Feed-Forward Network (FFN) of base model into multiple smaller expert networks, expanding the subnet search space. To prevent performance degradation at the start of fine-tuning, we further propose a pre-trained weight allocation strategy for the experts, coupled with a specific router initialization. During inference, only the input-relevant experts are activated to form a compact subnet. Experiments show that, pretrained with merely 1.56M open-source data, Dynamic-DINO outperforms Grounding DINO 1.5 Edge, pretrained on the private Grounding20M dataset.

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning excels in language models but struggles in vision-language models due to premature visual-to-text conversion that discards continuous information such as geometry and spatial layout. While recent methods enhance CoT through static enumeration or attention-based selection, they remain passive, i.e., processing pre-computed inputs rather than actively seeking task-relevant details. Inspired by human active perception, we introduce ViThinker, a framework that enables vision-language models to autonomously generate decision (query) tokens triggering the synthesis of expert-aligned visual features on demand. ViThinker internalizes vision-expert capabilities during training, performing generative mental simulation during inference without external tool calls. Through a two-stage curriculum: first distilling frozen experts into model parameters, then learning task-driven querying via sparsity penalties, i.e., ViThinker discovers minimal sufficient perception for each reasoning step. Evaluations across vision-centric benchmarks demonstrate consistent improvements, validating that active query generation outperforms passive approaches in both perceptual grounding and reasoning accuracy.

Scaling vision-language models into Visual Multiagent Systems (VMAS) is hindered by two coupled issues. First, communication topologies are fixed before inference, leaving them blind to visual content and query context; second, agent reasoning abilities remain static during deployment. These issues reinforce each other: a rigid topology fails to leverage richer agent expertise, while static agents lack incentives to specialize for a given query. We address this with SkillGraph, a joint framework that evolves both agent expertise and communication topology. Within this framework, a Multimodal Graph Transformer (MMGT) encodes visual tokens, instruction semantics and active skill embeddings to predict a query-conditioned collaboration graph, replacing hand-crafted routing with dynamic, content-aware information flow. Complementing this, a Skill Designer distills and refines reasoning heuristics from failure cases, constructing a self-evolving multimodal Skill Bank. Crucially, updated skill embeddings are fed back into the MMGT, enabling the topology to adapt alongside capability growth. Experiments show that SkillGraph achieves consistent improvements across four benchmarks, five common MAS structures and four base models. Code is available at https://github.com/niez233/skillgraph.

Multipanel images, commonly seen as web screenshots, posters, etc., pervade our daily lives. These images, characterized by their composition of multiple subfigures in distinct layouts, effectively convey information to people. Toward building advanced multimodal AI applications, such as agents that understand complex scenes and navigate through webpages, the skill of multipanel visual reasoning is essential, and a comprehensive evaluation of models in this regard is important. Therefore, our paper introduces Multipanel Visual Question Answering (MultipanelVQA), a novel benchmark that specifically challenges models in comprehending multipanel images. The benchmark comprises 6,600 questions and answers related to multipanel images. While these questions are straightforward for average humans, achieving nearly perfect correctness, they pose significant challenges to the state-of-the-art Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs) we tested. In our study, we utilized synthetically curated multipanel images specifically designed to isolate and evaluate the impact of diverse factors on model performance, revealing the sensitivity of LVLMs to various interferences in multipanel images, such as adjacent subfigures and layout complexity. As a result, MultipanelVQA highlights the need and direction for improving LVLMs' ability to understand complex visual-language contexts. Code and data are released at https://sites.google.com/view/multipanelvqa/home.

Visual Spatial Reasoning (VSR) is a core human cognitive ability and a critical requirement for advancing embodied intelligence and autonomous systems. Despite recent progress in Vision-Language Models (VLMs), achieving human-level VSR remains highly challenging due to the complexity of representing and reasoning over three-dimensional space. In this paper, we present a systematic investigation of VSR in VLMs, encompassing a review of existing methodologies across input modalities, model architectures, training strategies, and reasoning mechanisms. Furthermore, we categorize spatial intelligence into three levels of capability, ie, basic perception, spatial understanding, spatial planning, and curate SIBench, a spatial intelligence benchmark encompassing nearly 20 open-source datasets across 23 task settings. Experiments with state-of-the-art VLMs reveal a pronounced gap between perception and reasoning, as models show competence in basic perceptual tasks but consistently underperform in understanding and planning tasks, particularly in numerical estimation, multi-view reasoning, temporal dynamics, and spatial imagination. These findings underscore the substantial challenges that remain in achieving spatial intelligence, while providing both a systematic roadmap and a comprehensive benchmark to drive future research in the field. The related resources of this study are accessible at https://sibench.github.io/Awesome-Visual-Spatial-Reasoning/.

We present Thinking with Generated Images, a novel paradigm that fundamentally transforms how large multimodal models (LMMs) engage with visual reasoning by enabling them to natively think across text and vision modalities through spontaneous generation of intermediate visual thinking steps. Current visual reasoning with LMMs is constrained to either processing fixed user-provided images or reasoning solely through text-based chain-of-thought (CoT). Thinking with Generated Images unlocks a new dimension of cognitive capability where models can actively construct intermediate visual thoughts, critique their own visual hypotheses, and refine them as integral components of their reasoning process. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach through two complementary mechanisms: (1) vision generation with intermediate visual subgoals, where models decompose complex visual tasks into manageable components that are generated and integrated progressively, and (2) vision generation with self-critique, where models generate an initial visual hypothesis, analyze its shortcomings through textual reasoning, and produce refined outputs based on their own critiques. Our experiments on vision generation benchmarks show substantial improvements over baseline approaches, with our models achieving up to 50% (from 38% to 57%) relative improvement in handling complex multi-object scenarios. From biochemists exploring novel protein structures, and architects iterating on spatial designs, to forensic analysts reconstructing crime scenes, and basketball players envisioning strategic plays, our approach enables AI models to engage in the kind of visual imagination and iterative refinement that characterizes human creative, analytical, and strategic thinking. We release our open-source suite at https://github.com/GAIR-NLP/thinking-with-generated-images.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) that integrate visual and textual reasoning leverage chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting to tackle complex visual tasks, yet continue to exhibit visual hallucinations and an over-reliance on textual priors. We present a systematic diagnosis of state-of-the-art vision-language models using a three-stage evaluation framework, uncovering key failure modes. To address these, we propose an agent-based architecture that combines LLM reasoning with lightweight visual modules, enabling fine-grained analysis and iterative refinement of reasoning chains. Our results highlight future visual reasoning models should focus on integrating a broader set of specialized tools for analyzing visual content. Our system achieves significant gains (+10.3 on MMMU, +6.0 on MathVista over a 7B baseline), matching or surpassing much larger models. We will release our framework and evaluation suite to facilitate future research.

Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have recently demonstrated remarkable visual understanding performance on both vision-language and vision-centric tasks. However, they often fall short in integrating advanced, task-specific capabilities for compositional reasoning, which hinders their progress toward truly competent general vision models. To address this, we present a unified visual reasoning mechanism that enables LMMs to solve complicated compositional problems by leveraging their intrinsic capabilities (e.g. grounding and visual understanding capabilities). Different from the previous shortcut learning mechanism, our approach introduces a human-like understanding-thinking-answering process, allowing the model to complete all steps in a single pass forwarding without the need for multiple inferences or external tools. This design bridges the gap between foundational visual capabilities and general question answering, encouraging LMMs to generate faithful and traceable responses for complex visual reasoning. Meanwhile, we curate 334K visual instruction samples covering both general scenes and text-rich scenes and involving multiple foundational visual capabilities. Our trained model, Griffon-R, has the ability of end-to-end automatic understanding, self-thinking, and reasoning answers. Comprehensive experiments show that Griffon-R not only achieves advancing performance on complex visual reasoning benchmarks including VSR and CLEVR, but also enhances multimodal capabilities across various benchmarks like MMBench and ScienceQA. Data, models, and codes will be release at https://github.com/jefferyZhan/Griffon/tree/master/Griffon-R soon.

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) has emerged as an effective approach to reduce the computational overhead of Transformer architectures by sparsely activating a subset of parameters for each token while preserving high model capacity. This paradigm has recently been extended to Vision-Language Models (VLMs), enabling scalable multi-modal understanding with reduced computational cost. However, the widely adopted deterministic top-K routing mechanism may overlook more optimal expert combinations and lead to expert overfitting. To address this limitation and improve the diversity of expert selection, we propose MoE-GRPO, a reinforcement learning (RL)-based framework for optimizing expert routing in MoE-based VLMs. Specifically, we formulate expert selection as a sequential decision-making problem and optimize it using Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), allowing the model to learn adaptive expert routing policies through exploration and reward-based feedback. Furthermore, we introduce a modality-aware router guidance that enhances training stability and efficiency by discouraging the router from exploring experts that are infrequently activated for a given modality. Extensive experiments on multi-modal image and video benchmarks show that MoE-GRPO consistently outperforms standard top-K routing and its variants by promoting more diverse expert selection, thereby mitigating expert overfitting and enabling a task-level expert specialization.

With a view to bridging the gap between deep learning and symbolic AI, we present a novel end-to-end neural network architecture that learns to form propositional representations with an explicitly relational structure from raw pixel data. In order to evaluate and analyse the architecture, we introduce a family of simple visual relational reasoning tasks of varying complexity. We show that the proposed architecture, when pre-trained on a curriculum of such tasks, learns to generate reusable representations that better facilitate subsequent learning on previously unseen tasks when compared to a number of baseline architectures. The workings of a successfully trained model are visualised to shed some light on how the architecture functions.

This work explores enabling Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning to link visual cues across multiple images. A straightforward solution is to adapt rule-based reinforcement learning for Vision-Language Models (VLMs). However, such methods typically rely on manually curated question-answer pairs, which can be particularly challenging when dealing with fine grained visual details and complex logic across images. Inspired by self-supervised visual representation learning, we observe that images contain inherent constraints that can serve as supervision. Based on this insight, we construct image triplets comprising two augmented views of the same image and a third, similar but distinct image. During training, the model is prompted to generate a reasoning process to compare these images (i.e., determine same or different). Then we optimize the model with rule-based reinforcement learning. Due to the high visual similarity and the presence of augmentations, the model must attend to subtle visual changes and perform logical reasoning to succeed. Experiments show that, although trained solely on visual comparison tasks, the learned reasoning ability generalizes effectively to a wide range of questions. Without relying on any human-annotated question-answer pairs, our method achieves significant improvements on multi-image reasoning benchmarks and shows strong performance on general vision tasks.

We present Phi-4-reasoning-vision-15B, a compact open-weight multimodal reasoning model, and share the motivations, design choices, experiments, and learnings that informed its development. Our goal is to contribute practical insight to the research community on building smaller, efficient multimodal reasoning models and to share the result of these learnings as an open-weight model that is good at common vision and language tasks and excels at scientific and mathematical reasoning and understanding user interfaces. Our contributions include demonstrating that careful architecture choices and rigorous data curation enable smaller, open-weight multimodal models to achieve competitive performance with significantly less training and inference-time compute and tokens. The most substantial improvements come from systematic filtering, error correction, and synthetic augmentation -- reinforcing that data quality remains the primary lever for model performance. Systematic ablations show that high-resolution, dynamic-resolution encoders yield consistent improvements, as accurate perception is a prerequisite for high-quality reasoning. Finally, a hybrid mix of reasoning and non-reasoning data with explicit mode tokens allows a single model to deliver fast direct answers for simpler tasks and chain-of-thought reasoning for complex problems.

We present Ovis2.5, a successor to Ovis2 designed for native-resolution visual perception and strong multimodal reasoning. Ovis2.5 integrates a native-resolution vision transformer that processes images at their native, variable resolutions, avoiding the degradation from fixed-resolution tiling and preserving both fine detail and global layout -- crucial for visually dense content like complex charts. To strengthen reasoning, we train the model to move beyond linear chain-of-thought and perform reflection -- including self-checking and revision. This advanced capability is exposed as an optional "thinking mode" at inference time, allowing users to trade latency for enhanced accuracy on difficult inputs. The model is trained via a comprehensive five-phase curriculum that progressively builds its skills. The process begins with foundational visual and multimodal pretraining, advances through large-scale instruction tuning, and culminates in alignment and reasoning enhancement using DPO and GRPO. To scale these upgrades efficiently, we employ multimodal data packing and hybrid parallelism, yielding a significant end-to-end speedup. We release two open-source models: Ovis2.5-9B and Ovis2.5-2B. The latter continues the "small model, big performance" philosophy of Ovis2, making it ideal for resource-constrained, on-device scenarios. On the OpenCompass multimodal leaderboard, Ovis2.5-9B averages 78.3, marking a substantial improvement over its predecessor, Ovis2-8B, and achieving state-of-the-art results among open-source MLLMs in the sub-40B parameter range; Ovis2.5-2B scores 73.9, establishing SOTA for its size. Beyond aggregate scores, Ovis2.5 achieves leading results on STEM benchmarks, exhibits strong capabilities on grounding and video tasks, and achieves open-source SOTA at its scale for complex chart analysis.

Foundation vision-language models are currently transforming computer vision, and are on the rise in medical imaging fueled by their very promising generalization capabilities. However, the initial attempts to transfer this new paradigm to medical imaging have shown less impressive performances than those observed in other domains, due to the significant domain shift and the complex, expert domain knowledge inherent to medical-imaging tasks. Motivated by the need for domain-expert foundation models, we present FLAIR, a pre-trained vision-language model for universal retinal fundus image understanding. To this end, we compiled 37 open-access, mostly categorical fundus imaging datasets from various sources, with up to 97 different target conditions and 284,660 images. We integrate the expert's domain knowledge in the form of descriptive textual prompts, during both pre-training and zero-shot inference, enhancing the less-informative categorical supervision of the data. Such a textual expert's knowledge, which we compiled from the relevant clinical literature and community standards, describes the fine-grained features of the pathologies as well as the hierarchies and dependencies between them. We report comprehensive evaluations, which illustrate the benefit of integrating expert knowledge and the strong generalization capabilities of FLAIR under difficult scenarios with domain shifts or unseen categories. When adapted with a lightweight linear probe, FLAIR outperforms fully-trained, dataset-focused models, more so in the few-shot regimes. Interestingly, FLAIR outperforms by a large margin more generalist, larger-scale image-language models, which emphasizes the potential of embedding experts' domain knowledge and the limitations of generalist models in medical imaging.

The rapid advancement of educational applications, artistic creation, and AI-generated content (AIGC) technologies has substantially increased practical requirements for comprehensive Image Aesthetics Assessment (IAA), particularly demanding methods capable of delivering both quantitative scoring and professional understanding. Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM)-based IAA methods demonstrate stronger perceptual and generalization capabilities compared to traditional approaches, yet they suffer from modality bias (score-only or text-only) and lack fine-grained attribute decomposition, thereby failing to support further aesthetic assessment. In this paper, we present:(1) ArtiMuse, an innovative MLLM-based IAA model with Joint Scoring and Expert-Level Understanding capabilities; (2) ArtiMuse-10K, the first expert-curated image aesthetic dataset comprising 10,000 images spanning 5 main categories and 15 subcategories, each annotated by professional experts with 8-dimensional attributes analysis and a holistic score. Both the model and dataset will be made public to advance the field.

Very recently, a variety of vision transformer architectures for dense prediction tasks have been proposed and they show that the design of spatial attention is critical to their success in these tasks. In this work, we revisit the design of the spatial attention and demonstrate that a carefully-devised yet simple spatial attention mechanism performs favourably against the state-of-the-art schemes. As a result, we propose two vision transformer architectures, namely, Twins-PCPVT and Twins-SVT. Our proposed architectures are highly-efficient and easy to implement, only involving matrix multiplications that are highly optimized in modern deep learning frameworks. More importantly, the proposed architectures achieve excellent performance on a wide range of visual tasks, including image level classification as well as dense detection and segmentation. The simplicity and strong performance suggest that our proposed architectures may serve as stronger backbones for many vision tasks. Our code is released at https://github.com/Meituan-AutoML/Twins .

We consider the visual disambiguation task of determining whether a pair of visually similar images depict the same or distinct 3D surfaces (e.g., the same or opposite sides of a symmetric building). Illusory image matches, where two images observe distinct but visually similar 3D surfaces, can be challenging for humans to differentiate, and can also lead 3D reconstruction algorithms to produce erroneous results. We propose a learning-based approach to visual disambiguation, formulating it as a binary classification task on image pairs. To that end, we introduce a new dataset for this problem, Doppelgangers, which includes image pairs of similar structures with ground truth labels. We also design a network architecture that takes the spatial distribution of local keypoints and matches as input, allowing for better reasoning about both local and global cues. Our evaluation shows that our method can distinguish illusory matches in difficult cases, and can be integrated into SfM pipelines to produce correct, disambiguated 3D reconstructions. See our project page for our code, datasets, and more results: http://doppelgangers-3d.github.io/.

A visual metaphor constitutes a high-order form of human creativity, employing cross-domain semantic fusion to transform abstract concepts into impactful visual rhetoric. Despite the remarkable progress of generative AI, existing models remain largely confined to pixel-level instruction alignment and surface-level appearance preservation, failing to capture the underlying abstract logic necessary for genuine metaphorical generation. To bridge this gap, we introduce the task of Visual Metaphor Transfer (VMT), which challenges models to autonomously decouple the "creative essence" from a reference image and re-materialize that abstract logic onto a user-specified target subject. We propose a cognitive-inspired, multi-agent framework that operationalizes Conceptual Blending Theory (CBT) through a novel Schema Grammar ("G"). This structured representation decouples relational invariants from specific visual entities, providing a rigorous foundation for cross-domain logic re-instantiation. Our pipeline executes VMT through a collaborative system of specialized agents: a perception agent that distills the reference into a schema, a transfer agent that maintains generic space invariance to discover apt carriers, a generation agent for high-fidelity synthesis and a hierarchical diagnostic agent that mimics a professional critic, performing closed-loop backtracking to identify and rectify errors across abstract logic, component selection, and prompt encoding. Extensive experiments and human evaluations demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms SOTA baselines in metaphor consistency, analogy appropriateness, and visual creativity, paving the way for automated high-impact creative applications in advertising and media. Source code will be made publicly available.

Visual reasoning is critical for a wide range of computer vision tasks that go beyond surface-level object detection and classification. Despite notable advances in relational, symbolic, temporal, causal, and commonsense reasoning, existing surveys often address these directions in isolation, lacking a unified analysis and comparison across reasoning types, methodologies, and evaluation protocols. This survey aims to address this gap by categorizing visual reasoning into five major types (relational, symbolic, temporal, causal, and commonsense) and systematically examining their implementation through architectures such as graph-based models, memory networks, attention mechanisms, and neuro-symbolic systems. We review evaluation protocols designed to assess functional correctness, structural consistency, and causal validity, and critically analyze their limitations in terms of generalizability, reproducibility, and explanatory power. Beyond evaluation, we identify key open challenges in visual reasoning, including scalability to complex scenes, deeper integration of symbolic and neural paradigms, the lack of comprehensive benchmark datasets, and reasoning under weak supervision. Finally, we outline a forward-looking research agenda for next-generation vision systems, emphasizing that bridging perception and reasoning is essential for building transparent, trustworthy, and cross-domain adaptive AI systems, particularly in critical domains such as autonomous driving and medical diagnostics.

Instruction-guided image editing is becoming a general interface for visual work, yet existing benchmarks still focus largely on narrow appearance edits and do not fully capture the diversity of real-image tasks in professional workflows. Here, we define instructional computer vision problem solving as a broader formulation of image editing: given a real input image and a natural-language instruction, a system must produce an edited output that realizes the requested transformation while satisfying explicit preservation, geometric, physical, and usability constraints. We introduce CV-Arena, an open benchmark designed to evaluate this capability at professional scales. CV-Arena contains 12K high-resolution real-image instruction pairs spanning 16 instruction-based visual task types, constructed using CogRetriever, a dual-track retrieval-and-curation pipeline that combines targeted web search, agentic query refinement, verification, and traceability. To evaluate models at scale while preserving human fidelity, we propose Active Elo, a human-AI collaborative preference protocol that leverages CV-Judge, a logic-gated, multi-dimensional VLM evaluator, to reject clear failures and resolve high-confidence comparisons; and to route close, high-quality comparisons to expert raters. Mixed human and AI supervision is then aggregated through reliability-weighted Elo updates. Our comprehensive evaluation of 21 systems, including proprietary, open-source, and agentic models, on CV-Arena reveals persistent gaps in instruction adherence, physical reasoning, structural control, and fine-grained detail preservation. We further develop CV-Agent, a lightweight agentic model that combines planning, editing, and verification, and demonstrate that closed-loop reasoning is a promising direction for professional-grade instruction-following visual editing.

This paper proposes a simple, yet effective framework, called GiT, simultaneously applicable for various vision tasks only with a vanilla ViT. Motivated by the universality of the Multi-layer Transformer architecture (e.g, GPT) widely used in large language models (LLMs), we seek to broaden its scope to serve as a powerful vision foundation model (VFM). However, unlike language modeling, visual tasks typically require specific modules, such as bounding box heads for detection and pixel decoders for segmentation, greatly hindering the application of powerful multi-layer transformers in the vision domain. To solve this, we design a universal language interface that empowers the successful auto-regressive decoding to adeptly unify various visual tasks, from image-level understanding (e.g., captioning), over sparse perception (e.g., detection), to dense prediction (e.g., segmentation). Based on the above designs, the entire model is composed solely of a ViT, without any specific additions, offering a remarkable architectural simplification. GiT is a multi-task visual model, jointly trained across five representative benchmarks without task-specific fine-tuning. Interestingly, our GiT builds a new benchmark in generalist performance, and fosters mutual enhancement across tasks, leading to significant improvements compared to isolated training. This reflects a similar impact observed in LLMs. Further enriching training with 27 datasets, GiT achieves strong zero-shot results over various tasks. Due to its simple design, this paradigm holds promise for narrowing the architectural gap between vision and language. Code and models will be available at https://github.com/Haiyang-W/GiT.

Sparse expert models are a thirty-year old concept re-emerging as a popular architecture in deep learning. This class of architecture encompasses Mixture-of-Experts, Switch Transformers, Routing Networks, BASE layers, and others, all with the unifying idea that each example is acted on by a subset of the parameters. By doing so, the degree of sparsity decouples the parameter count from the compute per example allowing for extremely large, but efficient models. The resulting models have demonstrated significant improvements across diverse domains such as natural language processing, computer vision, and speech recognition. We review the concept of sparse expert models, provide a basic description of the common algorithms, contextualize the advances in the deep learning era, and conclude by highlighting areas for future work.