# MM-CoT:A Benchmark for Probing Visual Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in Multimodal Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.08228 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.08228/

## Key facts

- Cited by 34 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Multimodal reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 34 of its 59 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Dec 2025.

## Placed in

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

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 34)

- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [Qwen2.5-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13923/) (2025)
- [Improved Baselines with Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03744/) (2023)
- [Gemini 2.5: Pushing the Frontier with Advanced Reasoning, Multimodality, Long Context, and Next Generation Agentic Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.06261/) (2025)
- [Making the V in VQA Matter: Elevating the Role of Image Understanding in Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00837/) (2016)
- [Qwen-VL: A Versatile Vision-Language Model for Understanding, Localization, Text Reading, and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12966/) (2023)
- [MMBench: Is Your Multi-modal Model an All-around Player?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.06281/) (2023)
- [InternVL3: Exploring Advanced Training and Test-Time Recipes for Open-Source Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.10479/) (2025)
- [MME: A Comprehensive Evaluation Benchmark for Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.13394/) (2023)
- [MathVista: Evaluating Mathematical Reasoning of Foundation Models in Visual Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.02255/) (2023)
- [Flickr30k Entities: Collecting Region-to-Phrase Correspondences for Richer Image-to-Sentence Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04870/) (2015)
- [Language Models Don't Always Say What They Think: Unfaithful Explanations in Chain-of-Thought Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.04388/) (2023)
- [Program of Thoughts Prompting: Disentangling Computation from Reasoning for Numerical Reasoning Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12588/) (2022)
- [Show Your Work: Scratchpads for Intermediate Computation with Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.00114/) (2021)
- [Gemini: A Family of Highly Capable Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.11805/) (2023)
- [MMMU-Pro: A More Robust Multi-discipline Multimodal Understanding Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.02813/) (2024)
- [GLM-4.5: Agentic, Reasoning, and Coding (ARC) Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.06471/) (2025)
- [ShareGPT4Video: Improving Video Understanding and Generation with Better Captions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.04325/) (2024)
- [Towards Reasoning Era: A Survey of Long Chain-of-Thought for Reasoning Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.09567/) (2025)
- [A Survey on Hallucination in Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.00253/) (2024)
- [What matters when building vision-language models?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.02246/) (2024)
- [From System 1 to System 2: A Survey of Reasoning Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.17419/) (2025)
- [Chain-of-Thought Reasoning Without Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.10200/) (2024)
- [Multimodal Large Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.13165/) (2023)
- [Navigate through Enigmatic Labyrinth A Survey of Chain of Thought Reasoning: Advances, Frontiers and Future](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.15402/) (2023)
- [Multimodal Chain-of-Thought Reasoning: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.12605/) (2025)
- [Ovis2.5 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.11737/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 34)

- [FastVMT: Eliminating Redundancy in Video Motion Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.05551/) (2026)
- [LLM-CAS: Dynamic Neuron Perturbation for Real-Time Hallucination Correction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.18623/) (2025)
- [FlashVLM: Text-Guided Visual Token Selection for Large Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.20561/) (2025)
- [STORM: Search-Guided Generative World Models for Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.18477/) (2025)
- [Visual Latents Know More Than They Say: Unsilencing Latent Reasoning in MLLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.02735/) (2026)
- [CoAgent: Collaborative Planning and Consistency Agent for Coherent Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.22536/) (2025)
- [Grounding the Score: Explicit Visual Premise Verification for Reliable Vision-Language Process Reward Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.16253/) (2026)
- [Thinking With Tools, Not With Pixels: Tool Calls as Text Scaffolds for Visual Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.09682/) (2026)
- [Large Language Models as Discounted Bayesian Filters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.18489/) (2025)
- [Adaptive-VoCo: Complexity-Aware Visual Token Compression for Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.18496/) (2025)
- [Reasoning or Pattern Matching? Probing Large Vision-Language Models with Visual Puzzles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.13705/) (2026)
- [SPD-Faith Bench: Diagnosing and Improving Faithfulness in Chain-of-Thought for Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.07833/) (2026)
- [AgriWorld:A World Tools Protocol Framework for Verifiable Agricultural Reasoning with Code-Executing LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.15325/) (2026)
- [ResWM: Residual-Action World Model for Visual RL](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.11110/) (2026)
- [Reflective Confidence: Correcting Reasoning Flaws via Online Self-Correction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.18605/) (2025)
- [MoE-DiffuSeq: Enhancing Long-Document Diffusion Models with Sparse Attention and Mixture of Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.20604/) (2025)
- [Token-Budget Distillation: Transferring Full-Token Semantics to Compressed Video Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.28138/) (2026)
- [GTMA: Dynamic Representation Optimization for OOD Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.18504/) (2025)
- [PTTA: A Pure Text-to-Animation Framework for High-Quality Creation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.18614/) (2025)
- [SirenPose: Dynamic Scene Reconstruction via Geometric Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.20531/) (2025)
- [RevFFN: Memory-Efficient Full-Parameter Fine-Tuning of Mixture-of-Experts LLMs with Reversible Blocks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.20920/) (2025)
- [A Three-Level Alignment Framework for Large-Scale 3D Retrieval and Controlled 4D Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.22294/) (2025)
- [Learning Dynamic Scene Reconstruction with Sinusoidal Geometric Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.22295/) (2025)
- [Towards Efficient Post-Training via Fourier-Driven Adapter Architectures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.22378/) (2025)
- [Self-Rewarded Multimodal Coherent Reasoning Across Diverse Visual Domains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.22545/) (2025)
- [DNF: Dual-Layer Nested Fingerprinting for Large Language Model Intellectual Property Protection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.08223/) (2026)
- [Forgetting as a Feature: Cognitive Alignment of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.09726/) (2025)
- [Multi-Agent Cooperative Learning for Robust Vision-Language Alignment under OOD Concepts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.09746/) (2026)
- [LogicGaze: Benchmarking Causal Consistency in Visual Narratives via Counterfactual Verification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.00292/) (2026)
- [Bridging the Semantic Chasm: Synergistic Conceptual Anchoring for Generalized Few-Shot and Zero-Shot OOD Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.00340/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The ability to perform Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning marks a major milestone for multimodal models (MMs), enabling them to solve complex visual reasoning problems. Yet a critical question remains: is such reasoning genuinely grounded in visual evidence and logically coherent? Existing benchmarks emphasize generation but neglect verification, i.e., the capacity to assess whether a reasoning chain is both visually consistent and logically valid. To fill this gap, we introduce MM-CoT, a diagnostic benchmark specifically designed to probe the visual grounding and logical coherence of CoT reasoning in MMs. Instead of generating free-form explanations, models must select the sole event chain that satisfies two orthogonal constraints: (i) visual consistency, ensuring all steps are anchored in observable evidence, and (ii) logical coherence, ensuring causal and commonsense validity. Adversarial distractors are engineered to violate one of these constraints, exposing distinct reasoning failures. We evaluate leading vision-language models on MM-CoT and find that even the most advanced systems struggle, revealing a sharp discrepancy between generative fluency and true reasoning fidelity. MM-CoT shows low correlation with existing benchmarks, confirming that it measures a unique combination of visual grounding and logical reasoning. This benchmark provides a foundation for developing future models that reason not just plausibly, but faithfully and coherently within the visual world.