# VFaith: Do Large Multimodal Models Really Reason on Seen Images Rather than Previous Memories?

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.11571 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.11571/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Multimodal reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 32 of its 37 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Jun 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 32)

- [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)
- [DAPO: An Open-Source LLM Reinforcement Learning System at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.14476/) (2025)
- [LLaVA-OneVision: Easy Visual Task Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03326/) (2024)
- [InternVL3: Exploring Advanced Training and Test-Time Recipes for Open-Source Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.10479/) (2025)
- [Evaluating Object Hallucination in Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10355/) (2023)
- [OpenAI o1 System Card](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.16720/) (2024)
- [Kimi k1.5: Scaling Reinforcement Learning with LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12599/) (2025)
- [OlympiadBench: A Challenging Benchmark for Promoting AGI with Olympiad-Level Bilingual Multimodal Scientific Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.14008/) (2024)
- [Gemini: A Family of Highly Capable Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.11805/) (2023)
- [DeepSeek-VL2: Mixture-of-Experts Vision-Language Models for Advanced Multimodal Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.10302/) (2024)
- [VLM-R1: A Stable and Generalizable R1-style Large Vision-Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.07615/) (2025)
- [Visual-RFT: Visual Reinforcement Fine-Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.01785/) (2025)
- [LLaVA-CoT: Let Vision Language Models Reason Step-by-Step](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.10440/) (2024)
- [Hallucination of Multimodal Large Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.18930/) (2024)
- [Seed1.5-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.07062/) (2025)
- [R1-Onevision: Advancing Generalized Multimodal Reasoning through Cross-Modal Formalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.10615/) (2025)
- [We-Math: Does Your Large Multimodal Model Achieve Human-like Mathematical Reasoning?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.01284/) (2024)
- [Enhancing the Reasoning Ability of Multimodal Large Language Models via Mixed Preference Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.10442/) (2024)
- [SFT or RL? An Early Investigation into Training R1-Like Reasoning Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.11468/) (2025)
- [Mulberry: Empowering MLLM with o1-like Reasoning and Reflection via Collective Monte Carlo Tree Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.18319/) (2024)
- [Video-of-Thought: Step-by-Step Video Reasoning from Perception to Cognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.03230/) (2024)
- [Holistic Analysis of Hallucination in GPT-4V(ision): Bias and Interference Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.03287/) (2023)
- [M3CoT: A Novel Benchmark for Multi-Domain Multi-step Multi-modal Chain-of-Thought](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.16473/) (2024)
- [MME-Survey: A Comprehensive Survey on Evaluation of Multimodal LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15296/) (2024)
- [CIEM: Contrastive Instruction Evaluation Method for Better Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.02301/) (2023)
- [Eagle 2.5: Boosting Long-Context Post-Training for Frontier Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.15271/) (2025)
- [See, Think, Confirm: Interactive Prompting Between Vision and Language Models for Knowledge-based Visual Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.05226/) (2023)
- [MEGA-Bench: Scaling Multimodal Evaluation to over 500 Real-World Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.10563/) (2024)
- [Behind the Magic, MERLIM: Multi-modal Evaluation Benchmark for Large Image-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02219/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [On the Faithfulness of Visual Thinking: Measurement and Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.23482/) (2025)
- [SceneAlign: Aligning Multimodal Reasoning to Scene Graphs in Complex Visual Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.05600/) (2026)
- [Evaluating Reasoning Faithfulness in Medical Vision-Language Models using Multimodal Perturbations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.11196/) (2025)
- [What Does Vision Tool-Use Reinforcement Learning Really Learn? Disentangling Tool-Induced and Intrinsic Effects for Crop-and-Zoom](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.01334/) (2026)
- [V-FAT: Benchmarking Visual Fidelity Against Text-bias](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.04897/) (2026)
- [Position, Not Provenance: Separating Reasoning Mediation from Sycophancy in Medical Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.27304/) (2026)
- [Counterfactual Tests for Measuring Chain-of-Thought Faithfulness in Visual Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.06704/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent extensive works have demonstrated that by introducing long CoT, the capabilities of MLLMs to solve complex problems can be effectively enhanced. However, the reasons for the effectiveness of such paradigms remain unclear. It is challenging to analysis with quantitative results how much the model's specific extraction of visual cues and its subsequent so-called reasoning during inference process contribute to the performance improvements. Therefore, evaluating the faithfulness of MLLMs' reasoning to visual information is crucial. To address this issue, we first present a cue-driven automatic and controllable editing pipeline with the help of GPT-Image-1. It enables the automatic and precise editing of specific visual cues based on the instruction. Furthermore, we introduce VFaith-Bench, the first benchmark to evaluate MLLMs' visual reasoning capabilities and analyze the source of such capabilities with an emphasis on the visual faithfulness. Using the designed pipeline, we constructed comparative question-answer pairs by altering the visual cues in images that are crucial for solving the original reasoning problem, thereby changing the question's answer. By testing similar questions with images that have different details, the average accuracy reflects the model's visual reasoning ability, while the difference in accuracy before and after editing the test set images effectively reveals the relationship between the model's reasoning ability and visual perception. We further designed specific metrics to expose this relationship. VFaith-Bench includes 755 entries divided into five distinct subsets, along with an additional human-labeled perception task. We conducted in-depth testing and analysis of existing mainstream flagship models and prominent open-source model series/reasoning models on VFaith-Bench, further investigating the underlying factors of their reasoning capabilities.