# Mind with Eyes: from Language Reasoning to Multimodal Reasoning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.18071 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.18071/

## Key facts

- Cited by 22 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Multimodal reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 66 of its 73 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Mar 2025.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Multimodal reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/lr/multimodal-reasoning/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 66)

- [DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12948/) (2025)
- [Qwen2.5-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13923/) (2025)
- [LLaVA-OneVision: Easy Visual Task Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03326/) (2024)
- [InternVL: Scaling up Vision Foundation Models and Aligning for Generic Visual-Linguistic Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14238/) (2023)
- [WebArena: A Realistic Web Environment for Building Autonomous Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.13854/) (2023)
- [MathVista: Evaluating Mathematical Reasoning of Foundation Models in Visual Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.02255/) (2023)
- [Mastering Atari, Go, Chess and Shogi by Planning with a Learned Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.08265/) (2019)
- [Kimi k1.5: Scaling Reinforcement Learning with LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12599/) (2025)
- [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)
- [MiniCPM: Unveiling the Potential of Small Language Models with Scalable Training Strategies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.06395/) (2024)
- [Vision-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.06749/) (2025)
- [Visual-RFT: Visual Reinforcement Fine-Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.01785/) (2025)
- [OPERA: Alleviating Hallucination in Multi-Modal Large Language Models via Over-Trust Penalty and Retrospection-Allocation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17911/) (2023)
- [LLaVA-CoT: Let Vision Language Models Reason Step-by-Step](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.10440/) (2024)
- [Towards Reasoning Era: A Survey of Long Chain-of-Thought for Reasoning Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.09567/) (2025)
- [Towards Large Reasoning Models: A Survey of Reinforced Reasoning with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.09686/) (2025)
- [Visual CoT: Advancing Multi-Modal Language Models with a Comprehensive Dataset and Benchmark for Chain-of-Thought Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.16999/) (2024)
- [Visual Sketchpad: Sketching as a Visual Chain of Thought for Multimodal Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09403/) (2024)
- [Enhancing the Reasoning Ability of Multimodal Large Language Models via Mixed Preference Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.10442/) (2024)
- [Imagine while Reasoning in Space: Multimodal Visualization-of-Thought](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.07542/) (2025)
- [VisualGPT: Data-efficient Adaptation of Pretrained Language Models for Image Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.10407/) (2021)
- [Mulberry: Empowering MLLM with o1-like Reasoning and Reflection via Collective Monte Carlo Tree Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.18319/) (2024)
- [LAMM: Language-Assisted Multi-Modal Instruction-Tuning Dataset, Framework, and Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.06687/) (2023)
- [R1-Zero's "Aha Moment" in Visual Reasoning on a 2B Non-SFT Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.05132/) (2025)
- [Compositional Chain-of-Thought Prompting for Large Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17076/) (2023)
- [LlamaV-o1: Rethinking Step-by-step Visual Reasoning in LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.06186/) (2025)
- [Multi-Step Reasoning with Large Language Models, a Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.11511/) (2024)
- [Improve Vision Language Model Chain-of-thought Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.16198/) (2024)
- [Can MLLMs Reason in Multimodality? EMMA: An Enhanced MultiModal ReAsoning Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.05444/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 22 of 22)

- [A Sober Look at Progress in Language Model Reasoning: Pitfalls and Paths to Reproducibility](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.07086/) (2025)
- [ThinkMorph: Emergent Properties in Multimodal Interleaved Chain-of-Thought Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.27492/) (2025)
- [Multimodal Spatial Reasoning in the Large Model Era: A Survey and Benchmarks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.25760/) (2025)
- [MoDoMoDo: Multi-Domain Data Mixtures for Multimodal LLM Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.24871/) (2025)
- [Explain Before You Answer: A Survey on Compositional Visual Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.17298/) (2025)
- [From Perception to Cognition: A Survey of Vision-Language Interactive Reasoning in Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.25373/) (2025)
- [Multimodal Large Language Models Meet Multimodal Emotion Recognition and Reasoning: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.24322/) (2025)
- [Reinforcement Fine-Tuning Powers Reasoning Capability of Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.18536/) (2025)
- [ViC-Bench: Benchmarking Visual-Interleaved Chain-of-Thought Capability in MLLMs with Free-Style Intermediate State Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.14404/) (2025)
- [BMMR: A Large-Scale Bilingual Multimodal Multi-Discipline Reasoning Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.03483/) (2025)
- [PhysicsArena: The First Multimodal Physics Reasoning Benchmark Exploring Variable, Process, and Solution Dimensions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.15472/) (2025)
- [BLINK-Twice: You see, but do you observe? A Reasoning Benchmark on Visual Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.09361/) (2025)
- [COOPER: A Unified Model for Cooperative Perception and Reasoning in Spatial Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.04563/) (2025)
- [Beyond Pipelines: A Survey of the Paradigm Shift toward Model-Native Agentic AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.16720/) (2025)
- [Unlocking Multimodal Document Intelligence: From Current Triumphs to Future Frontiers of Visual Document Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.19961/) (2026)
- [ThinkOmni: Lifting Textual Reasoning to Omni-modal Scenarios via Guidance Decoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.23306/) (2026)
- [STAR: Mitigating Cascading Errors in Spatial Reasoning via Turn-point Alignment and Segment-level DPO](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.00558/) (2026)
- [ChainMPQ: Interleaved Text-Image Reasoning Chains for Mitigating Relation Hallucinations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.06292/) (2025)
- [From Perception to Reasoning: Deep Thinking Empowers Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.12861/) (2025)
- [Imagine in Space: Exploring the Frontier of Spatial Intelligence and Reasoning Efficiency in Vision Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.13782/) (2025)
- [M3-ACE: Rectifying Visual Perception in Multimodal Math Reasoning via Multi-Agentic Context Engineering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.08369/) (2026)
- [Balanced Thinking: Improving Chain of Thought Training in Vision Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.18656/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Language models have recently advanced into the realm of reasoning, yet it is through multimodal reasoning that we can fully unlock the potential to achieve more comprehensive, human-like cognitive capabilities. This survey provides a systematic overview of the recent multimodal reasoning approaches, categorizing them into two levels: language-centric multimodal reasoning and collaborative multimodal reasoning. The former encompasses one-pass visual perception and active visual perception, where vision primarily serves a supporting role in language reasoning. The latter involves action generation and state update within reasoning process, enabling a more dynamic interaction between modalities. Furthermore, we analyze the technical evolution of these methods, discuss their inherent challenges, and introduce key benchmark tasks and evaluation metrics for assessing multimodal reasoning performance. Finally, we provide insights into future research directions from the following two perspectives: (i) from visual-language reasoning to omnimodal reasoning and (ii) from multimodal reasoning to multimodal agents. This survey aims to provide a structured overview that will inspire further advancements in multimodal reasoning research.