mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

V-Thinker: Interactive Thinking with Images

arXiv 2511.04460 ↗First posted 6 Nov 2025cs.CVcited by 26

On the map: LLM reasoning → Multimodal reasoning

also in 1 more
Abstract (arXiv)

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.

Key facts. Cited by 26 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Multimodal reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning. Builds on 61 of its 78 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 6 Nov 2025.

Builds on

61 of 78 references.

Closest ancestors · 34

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2025MathCanvas: Intrinsic Visual Chain-of-Thought for Multimodal Mathematical Reasoning16 Oct
  2. 2025Look Less, Reason More: Rollout-Guided Adaptive Pixel-Space Reasoning2 Oct
  3. 2025DeepSketcher: Internalizing Visual Manipulation for Multimodal Reasoning30 Sep
  4. 2025From Perception to Cognition: A Survey of Vision-Language Interactive Reasoning in Multimodal Large Language Models29 Sep
  5. 2025Reinforced Visual Perception with Tools1 Sep
  6. 2025Self-Rewarding Vision-Language Model via Reasoning Decomposition27 Aug
  7. 2025InternVL3.5: Advancing Open-Source Multimodal Models in Versatility, Reasoning, and Efficiency25 Aug
  8. 2025Simple o3: Towards Interleaved Vision-Language Reasoning16 Aug
  9. 2025Thyme: Think Beyond Images15 Aug
  10. 2025We-Math 2.0: A Versatile MathBook System for Incentivizing Visual Mathematical Reasoning14 Aug
  11. 2025MathOPEval: A Fine-grained Evaluation Benchmark for Visual Operations of MLLMs in Mathematical Reasoning24 Jul
  12. 2025Thinking with Images for Multimodal Reasoning: Foundations, Methods, and Future Frontiers30 Jun
22 more
  1. 2025WeThink: Toward General-purpose Vision-Language Reasoning via Reinforcement Learning9 Jun
  2. 2025SRPO: Enhancing Multimodal LLM Reasoning via Reflection-Aware Reinforcement Learning2 Jun
  3. 2025VTool-R1: VLMs Learn to Think with Images via Reinforcement Learning on Multimodal Tool Use25 May
  4. 2025MathCoder-VL: Bridging Vision and Code for Enhanced Multimodal Mathematical Reasoning15 May
  5. 2025VisuLogic: A Benchmark for Evaluating Visual Reasoning in Multi-modal Large Language Models21 Apr
  6. 2025NoisyRollout: Reinforcing Visual Reasoning with Data Augmentation17 Apr
  7. 2025SFT or RL? An Early Investigation into Training R1-Like Reasoning Large Vision-Language Models10 Apr
  8. 2025SoTA with Less: MCTS-Guided Sample Selection for Data-Efficient Visual Reasoning Self-Improvement10 Apr
  9. 2025R1-Onevision: Advancing Generalized Multimodal Reasoning through Cross-Modal Formalization13 Mar
  10. 2025MM-Eureka: Exploring the Frontiers of Multimodal Reasoning with Rule-based Reinforcement Learning10 Mar
  11. 2025Vision-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in Multimodal Large Language Models9 Mar
  12. 2024Progressive Multimodal Reasoning via Active Retrieval19 Dec
  13. 2024DynaMath: A Dynamic Visual Benchmark for Evaluating Mathematical Reasoning Robustness of Vision Language Models29 Oct
  14. 2024CMM-Math: A Chinese Multimodal Math Dataset To Evaluate and Enhance the Mathematics Reasoning of Large Multimodal Models4 Sep
  15. 2024Math-PUMA: Progressive Upward Multimodal Alignment to Enhance Mathematical Reasoning16 Aug
  16. 2024LogicVista: Multimodal LLM Logical Reasoning Benchmark in Visual Contexts6 Jul
  17. 2024We-Math: Does Your Large Multimodal Model Achieve Human-like Mathematical Reasoning?1 Jul
  18. 2024Math-LLaVA: Bootstrapping Mathematical Reasoning for Multimodal Large Language Models25 Jun
  19. 2024Visual Sketchpad: Sketching as a Visual Chain of Thought for Multimodal Language Models13 Jun
  20. 2024Measuring Multimodal Mathematical Reasoning with MATH-Vision Dataset22 Feb
  21. 2023MathVista: Evaluating Mathematical Reasoning of Foundation Models in Visual Contexts3 Oct
  22. 2022Interactive Visual Reasoning under Uncertainty18 Jun

Other references · 27

  1. 2024DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Modelscited by 8,851
  2. 2025Qwen2.5-VL Technical Reportcited by 5,418
  3. 2023Improved Baselines with Visual Instruction Tuningcited by 4,362
  4. 2025InternVL3: Exploring Advanced Training and Test-Time Recipes for Open-Source Multimodal Modelscited by 1,769
  5. 2024MathVerse: Does Your Multi-modal LLM Truly See the Diagrams in Visual Math Problems?cited by 573
  6. 2024DeepSeek-VL2: Mixture-of-Experts Vision-Language Models for Advanced Multimodal Understandingcited by 559
  7. 2024VLMEvalKit: An Open-Source Toolkit for Evaluating Large Multi-Modality Modelscited by 443
  8. 2025Seed1.5-VL Technical Reportcited by 367
  9. 2024A Survey on Hallucination in Large Vision-Language Modelscited by 352
  10. 2025R1-VL: Learning to Reason with Multimodal Large Language Models via Step-wise Group Relative Policy Optimizationcited by 296
  11. 2025LLaVA-OneVision-1.5: Fully Open Framework for Democratized Multimodal Trainingcited by 233
  12. 2024CharXiv: Charting Gaps in Realistic Chart Understanding in Multimodal LLMscited by 229
15 more
  1. 2023LLaVA-Plus: Learning to Use Tools for Creating Multimodal Agentscited by 188
  2. 2025Agentic Reinforced Policy Optimizationcited by 166
  3. 2024Self-play with Execution Feedback: Improving Instruction-following Capabilities of Large Language Modelscited by 73
  4. 2023Image Denoising: The Deep Learning Revolution and Beyond -- A Survey Paper --cited by 71
  5. 2025PyVision: Agentic Vision with Dynamic Toolingcited by 71
  6. 2025Tool-Star: Empowering LLM-Brained Multi-Tool Reasoner via Reinforcement Learningcited by 67
  7. 2024CS-Bench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Large Language Models towards Computer Science Masterycited by 30
  8. 2024Understand What LLM Needs: Dual Preference Alignment for Retrieval-Augmented Generationcited by 27
  9. 2025Video-STAR: Reinforcing Open-Vocabulary Action Recognition with Toolscited by 23
  10. 2025M2-Reasoning: Empowering MLLMs with Unified General and Spatial Reasoningcited by 16
  11. 2025Geoint-R1: Formalizing Multimodal Geometric Reasoning with Dynamic Auxiliary Constructionscited by 10
  12. 2024Toward General Instruction-Following Alignment for Retrieval-Augmented Generationcited by 9
  13. 2025Poison as Cure: Visual Noise for Mitigating Object Hallucinations in LVMscited by 9
  14. 2025GeoSketch: A Neural-Symbolic Approach to Geometric Multimodal Reasoning with Auxiliary Line Construction and Affine Transformationcited by 6
  15. 2025ToolScope: An Agentic Framework for Vision-Guided and Long-Horizon Tool Usecited by 2

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2025: 1; 2026: 25.

26 papers.

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By area:

  1. 2026PyVision-RL: Forging Open Agentic Vision Models via RLcited by 14
  2. 2026Act Wisely: Cultivating Meta-Cognitive Tool Use in Agentic Multimodal Modelscited by 13
  3. 2026VTC-Bench: Evaluating Agentic Multimodal Models via Compositional Visual Tool Chainingcited by 12
  4. 2026VisRefiner: Learning from Visual Differences for Screenshot-to-Code Generationcited by 7
  5. 2026S1-VL: Scientific Multimodal Reasoning Model with Thinking-with-Imagescited by 5
  6. 2026VideoSearcher: Empowering Video Deep Research with Multi-Tool Agentic Reasoning via Reinforcement Learningcited by 5
  7. 2025Thinking with Images via Self-Calling Agentcited by 4
  8. 2026ET-Agent: Incentivizing Effective Tool-Integrated Reasoning Agent via Behavior Calibrationcited by 4
  9. 2026Self-Consistent Latent Reasoning: Long Latent Sequence Reasoning for Vision-Language Modelcited by 3
  10. 2026TVI-CoT: Text-Visual Interleaved Chain-of-Thought Reasoning for Multimodal Understandingcited by 3
  11. 2026Agent Explorative Policy Optimization for Multimodal Agentic Reasoningcited by 2
  12. 2026ATLAS: Agentic or Latent Visual Reasoning? One Word is Enough for Bothcited by 1
14 more
  1. 2026Reversing the Flow: Generation-to-Understanding Synergy in Large Multimodal Modelscited by 1
  2. 2026Dynamo: Dynamic Skill-Tool Evolution for Vision-Language Agentscited by 1
  3. 2026Beacon: Knowing When and How to Perform Agentic Visual Reasoningcited by 1
  4. 2026Thinking with Drafting: Optical Decompression via Logical Reconstructioncited by 0
  5. 2026CiQi-Agent: Aligning Vision, Tools and Aesthetics in Multimodal Agent for Cultural Reasoning on Chinese Porcelainscited by 0
  6. 2026ROVER: Routing Object-Centric Visual Evidence for Grounded Multi-Image Reasoningcited by 0
  7. 2026See2Think: Do Multimodal Models Really Use Intermediate Visual States?cited by 0
  8. 2026PeCA: Palette Context Assisted Inference for Test-Time Paint-Bucket Colourisation on Animation Videoscited by 0
  9. 2026Aphanta: Diagnosing Task-Aligned Image-Edited Intermediates for Multimodal Reasoningcited by 0
  10. 2026Making Every Tool Call Count: Necessary Tool-Evidence Path Rewards for Agentic Vision-Language Modelscited by 0
  11. 2026Multimodal Thinking with Renderable Programscited by 0
  12. 2026MM-OPD: Towards One More Bottleneck Between Perception and Reasoningcited by 0
  13. 2026SciGen-Verifier: A Multimodal Reasoner for Explainable Verification in Scientific Image Generationcited by 0
  14. 2026Agentic Tool-Augmented Reasoning for Explainable Image Forgery Detectioncited by 0

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2026See It, Say It, Sorted: An Iterative Training-Free Framework for Visually-Grounded Multimodal Reasoning in LVLMs
  2. 2025VR-Thinker: Boosting Video Reward Models through Thinking-with-Image Reasoning
  3. 2026Visually-Guided Policy Optimization for Multimodal Reasoning
  4. 2025More Thought, Less Accuracy? On the Dual Nature of Reasoning in Vision-Language Models
  5. 2026VLA-Thinker: Boosting Vision-Language-Action Models through Thinking-with-Image Reasoning
  6. 2026See Further, Think Deeper: Advancing VLM's Reasoning Ability with Low-level Visual Cues and Reflection
  7. 2025ThinkMorph: Emergent Properties in Multimodal Interleaved Chain-of-Thought Reasoning
  8. 2026Scaffolding Minds: Optimizing Latent Visual Target Representations for Multimodal Reasoning