# AStar: Boosting Multimodal Reasoning with Automated Structured Thinking

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.02339 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.02339/

## Key facts

- Cited by 25 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Multimodal reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 55 of its 82 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Feb 2025.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Multimodal reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/lr/multimodal-reasoning/)
- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [VLM benchmarks and visual reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/vlm-benchmarks-and-visual-reasoning/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 55)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Proximal Policy Optimization Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.06347/) (2017)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03300/) (2024)
- [DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12948/) (2025)
- [GPT-4o System Card](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.21276/) (2024)
- [Improved Baselines with Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03744/) (2023)
- [Qwen2-VL: Enhancing Vision-Language Model's Perception of the World at Any Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12191/) (2024)
- [Tree of Thoughts: Deliberate Problem Solving with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10601/) (2023)
- [MiniGPT-4: Enhancing Vision-Language Understanding with Advanced Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.10592/) (2023)
- [InternVL: Scaling up Vision Foundation Models and Aligning for Generic Visual-Linguistic Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14238/) (2023)
- [Qwen-VL: A Versatile Vision-Language Model for Understanding, Localization, Text Reading, and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12966/) (2023)
- [MMMU: A Massive Multi-discipline Multimodal Understanding and Reasoning Benchmark for Expert AGI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16502/) (2023)
- [MathVista: Evaluating Mathematical Reasoning of Foundation Models in Visual Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.02255/) (2023)
- [ChartQA: A Benchmark for Question Answering about Charts with Visual and Logical Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10244/) (2022)
- [Kimi k1.5: Scaling Reinforcement Learning with LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12599/) (2025)
- [M3-Embedding: Multi-Linguality, Multi-Functionality, Multi-Granularity Text Embeddings Through Self-Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03216/) (2024)
- [Math-Shepherd: Verify and Reinforce LLMs Step-by-step without Human Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.08935/) (2023)
- [Are We on the Right Way for Evaluating Large Vision-Language Models?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.20330/) (2024)
- [A Survey on Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.13549/) (2023)
- [Reasoning with Language Model is Planning with World Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14992/) (2023)
- [Multimodal Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.00923/) (2023)
- [DeepSeek-VL: Towards Real-World Vision-Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05525/) (2024)
- [MathVerse: Does Your Multi-modal LLM Truly See the Diagrams in Visual Math Problems?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14624/) (2024)
- [BLINK: Multimodal Large Language Models Can See but Not Perceive](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.12390/) (2024)
- [Measuring Multimodal Mathematical Reasoning with MATH-Vision Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.14804/) (2024)
- [LLaVA-CoT: Let Vision Language Models Reason Step-by-Step](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.10440/) (2024)
- [InternLM-XComposer2: Mastering Free-form Text-Image Composition and Comprehension in Vision-Language Large Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.16420/) (2024)
- [A Survey on Multimodal Large Language Models for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12320/) (2023)
- [SPHINX: The Joint Mixing of Weights, Tasks, and Visual Embeddings for Multi-modal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.07575/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 25 of 25)

- [Towards Reasoning Era: A Survey of Long Chain-of-Thought for Reasoning Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.09567/) (2025)
- [Multimodal Chain-of-Thought Reasoning: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.12605/) (2025)
- [VLM-R3: Region Recognition, Reasoning, and Refinement for Enhanced Multimodal Chain-of-Thought](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.16192/) (2025)
- [SophiaVL-R1: Reinforcing MLLMs Reasoning with Thinking Reward](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.17018/) (2025)
- [100 Days After DeepSeek-R1: A Survey on Replication Studies and More Directions for Reasoning Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.00551/) (2025)
- [A Survey on Agentic Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.10991/) (2025)
- [Mind with Eyes: from Language Reasoning to Multimodal Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.18071/) (2025)
- [VLRMBench: A Comprehensive and Challenging Benchmark for Vision-Language Reward Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.07478/) (2025)
- [Think in Safety: Unveiling and Mitigating Safety Alignment Collapse in Multimodal Large Reasoning Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.06538/) (2025)
- [Atlas: Orchestrating Heterogeneous Models and Tools for Multi-Domain Complex Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.03872/) (2026)
- [Beyond Pipelines: A Survey of the Paradigm Shift toward Model-Native Agentic AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.16720/) (2025)
- [Scaling Test-Time Inference with Policy-Optimized, Dynamic Retrieval-Augmented Generation via KV Caching and Decoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.01281/) (2025)
- [Socratic-MCTS: Test-Time Visual Reasoning by Asking the Right Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.08927/) (2025)
- [TACO: Tool-Augmented Credit Optimization for Agentic Tool Use](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.30251/) (2026)
- [FloorPlan-DeepSeek (FPDS): A multimodal approach to floorplan generation using vector-based next room prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.21562/) (2025)
- [Two-Stage Regularization-Based Structured Pruning for LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.18232/) (2025)
- [ArchiLense: A Framework for Quantitative Analysis of Architectural Styles Based on Vision Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.07739/) (2025)
- [PROPA: Toward Process-level Optimization in Visual Reasoning via Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.10279/) (2025)
- [From Perception to Reasoning: Deep Thinking Empowers Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.12861/) (2025)
- [See, Think, Learn: A Self-Taught Multimodal Reasoner](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.02456/) (2025)
- [Aligning Large Vision-Language Models at Test Time: A Trajectory-Guided Structured Sampling Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.03204/) (2026)
- [UrbanSense:A Framework for Quantitative Analysis of Urban Streetscapes leveraging Vision Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.10342/) (2025)
- [Ascending the Infinite Ladder: Benchmarking Spatial Deformation Reasoning in Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.02978/) (2025)
- [CoFEE: Reasoning Control for LLM-Based Feature Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.21584/) (2026)
- [Late-Layer Fusion is Enough: Dual-Path Vision Token Routing for Multimodal Large Language Models under Visual Saturation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.09131/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Multimodal large language models excel across diverse domains but struggle with complex visual reasoning tasks. To enhance their reasoning capabilities, current approaches typically rely on explicit search or post-training techniques. However, search-based methods suffer from computational inefficiency due to extensive solution space exploration, while post-training methods demand substantial data, computational resources, and often exhibit training instability. To address these challenges, we propose AStar, a training-free, Automatic Structured thinking paradigm for multimodal reasoning. Specifically, we introduce novel ``thought cards'', a lightweight library of high-level reasoning patterns abstracted from prior samples. For each test problem, AStar adaptively retrieves the optimal thought cards and seamlessly integrates these external explicit guidelines with the model's internal implicit reasoning capabilities. Compared to previous methods, AStar eliminates computationally expensive explicit search and avoids additional complex post-training processes, enabling a more efficient reasoning approach. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework achieves 53.9% accuracy on MathVerse (surpassing GPT-4o's 50.2%) and 32.7% on MathVision (outperforming GPT-4o's 30.4%). Further analysis reveals the remarkable transferability of our method: thought cards generated from mathematical reasoning can also be applied to other reasoning tasks, even benefiting general visual perception and understanding. AStar serves as a plug-and-play test-time inference method, compatible with other post-training techniques, providing an important complement to existing multimodal reasoning approaches.