Forest Before Trees: Latent Superposition for Efficient Visual Reasoning
On the map: LLM reasoning → Multimodal reasoning
Abstract (arXiv)
While Chain-of-Thought empowers Large Vision-Language Models with multi-step reasoning, explicit textual rationales suffer from an information bandwidth bottleneck, where continuous visual details are discarded during discrete tokenization. Recent latent reasoning methods attempt to address this challenge, but often fall prey to premature semantic collapse due to rigid autoregressive objectives. In this paper, we propose Laser, a novel paradigm that reformulates visual deduction via Dynamic Windowed Alignment Learning (DWAL). Instead of forcing a point-wise prediction, Laser aligns the latent state with a dynamic validity window of future semantics. This mechanism enforces a "Forest-before-Trees" cognitive hierarchy, enabling the model to maintain a probabilistic superposition of global features before narrowing down to local details. Crucially, Laser maintains interpretability via decodable trajectories while stabilizing unconstrained learning via Self-Refined Superposition. Extensive experiments on 6 benchmarks demonstrate that Laser achieves state-of-the-art performance among latent reasoning methods, surpassing the strong baseline Monet by 5.03% on average. Notably, it achieves these gains with extreme efficiency, reducing inference tokens by more than 97%, while demonstrating robust generalization to out-of-distribution domains.
Key facts. Cited by 16 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Multimodal reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning. Builds on 25 of its 46 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 11 Jan 2026.
Builds on
25 of 46 references.
Closest ancestors · 15
Same direction, newest first
- 2025Sketch-in-Latents: Eliciting Unified Reasoning in MLLMs18 Dec
- 2025Reasoning Within the Mind: Dynamic Multimodal Interleaving in Latent Space14 Dec
- 2025Interleaved Latent Visual Reasoning with Selective Perceptual Modeling5 Dec
- 2025Monet: Reasoning in Latent Visual Space Beyond Images and Language26 Nov
- 2025LaRe: Latent Refocusing for Multimodal Reasoning4 Nov
- 2025Latent Sketchpad: Sketching Visual Thoughts to Elicit Multimodal Reasoning in MLLMs28 Oct
- 2025Reasoning in the Dark: Interleaved Vision-Text Reasoning in Latent Space14 Oct
- 2025Latent Visual Reasoning29 Sep
- 2025InternVL3.5: Advancing Open-Source Multimodal Models in Versatility, Reasoning, and Efficiency25 Aug
- 2025Multimodal Chain of Continuous Thought for Latent-Space Reasoning in Vision-Language Models18 Aug
- 2025Perception-Aware Policy Optimization for Multimodal Reasoning8 Jul
- 2025Machine Mental Imagery: Empower Multimodal Reasoning with Latent Visual Tokens20 Jun
3 more
Other references · 10
- 2023GPT-4 Technical Reportcited by 18,132
- 2025Qwen2.5-VL Technical Reportcited by 5,418
- 2025Qwen3-VL Technical Reportcited by 2,534
- 2024Training Large Language Models to Reason in a Continuous Latent Spacecited by 763
- 2024Titans: Learning to Memorize at Test Timecited by 303
- 2024Quiet-STaR: Language Models Can Teach Themselves to Think Before Speakingcited by 292
- 2024SEED-Bench-2-Plus: Benchmarking Multimodal Large Language Models with Text-Rich Visual Comprehensioncited by 144
- 2025SoftCoT: Soft Chain-of-Thought for Efficient Reasoning with LLMscited by 110
- 2025Mull-Tokens: Modality-Agnostic Latent Thinkingcited by 15
- 2025ViPER: Empowering the Self-Evolution of Visual Perception Abilities in Vision-Language Modelcited by 11
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Citing papers per year: 2026: 16.
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- 2026Zooming without Zooming: Region-to-Image Distillation for Fine-Grained Multimodal Perceptioncited by 47
- 2026HyLaR: Hybrid Latent Reasoning with Decoupled Policy Optimizationcited by 6
- 2026What's Holding Back Latent Visual Reasoning?cited by 6
- 2026Beyond Visual Memory: Mechanistic Diagnostics of Latent Visual Reasoningcited by 4
- 2026Visual Enhanced Depth Scaling for Multimodal Latent Reasoningcited by 3
- 2026Breaking the Martingale Curse: Multi-Agent Debate via Asymmetric Cognitive Potential Energycited by 2
- 2026CoLVR: Enhancing Exploratory Latent Visual Reasoning via Contrastive Optimizationcited by 2
- 2026ReGuLaR: Relation-Grounded Latent Reasoning for Large Vision-Language Modelscited by 2
- 2026LUT: Latent Utility Training for Visual Reasoningcited by 2
- 2026Detecting AI-Generated Video: A Vision-Language Dual-View Surveycited by 1
- 2026Reason Through the Latent! Making Latent Visual Reasoning Necessarycited by 1
- 2026Geometric Decoupling: Diagnosing the Structural Instability of Latentcited by 0
4 more
- 2026VideoLatent: Video-Language Learning via Latent Self-Forcingcited by 0
- 2026OPLD: On-Policy Latent Distillation for Multimodal Reasoningcited by 0
- 2026Rethinking Latent Visual Reasoning: Grounding Latent Reasoning in Visual Evidencecited by 0
- 2026Soft Spatial Reasoningcited by 0
- 2026Soft Spatial Reasoning30 Sep 2026
- 2026Rethinking Latent Visual Reasoning: Grounding Latent Reasoning in Visual Evidence28 Sep 2026
- 2026Reason Through the Latent! Making Latent Visual Reasoning Necessary6 Sep 2026
- 2026LUT: Latent Utility Training for Visual Reasoning1 Aug 2026
- 2026OPLD: On-Policy Latent Distillation for Multimodal Reasoning30 Jul 2026
- 2026Detecting AI-Generated Video: A Vision-Language Dual-View Survey12 Jul 2026
- 2026VideoLatent: Video-Language Learning via Latent Self-Forcing22 Jun 2026
- 2026Beyond Visual Memory: Mechanistic Diagnostics of Latent Visual Reasoning31 May 2026
- 2026ReGuLaR: Relation-Grounded Latent Reasoning for Large Vision-Language Models28 May 2026
- 2026What's Holding Back Latent Visual Reasoning?18 May 2026
- 2026CoLVR: Enhancing Exploratory Latent Visual Reasoning via Contrastive Optimization9 May 2026
- 2026HyLaR: Hybrid Latent Reasoning with Decoupled Policy Optimization22 Apr 2026
4 more
- 2026Geometric Decoupling: Diagnosing the Structural Instability of Latent20 Apr 2026
- 2026Visual Enhanced Depth Scaling for Multimodal Latent Reasoning12 Apr 2026
- 2026Breaking the Martingale Curse: Multi-Agent Debate via Asymmetric Cognitive Potential Energy6 Mar 2026
- 2026Zooming without Zooming: Region-to-Image Distillation for Fine-Grained Multimodal Perception12 Feb 2026
- 2026HyLaR: Hybrid Latent Reasoning with Decoupled Policy Optimizationcited by 6
- 2026What's Holding Back Latent Visual Reasoning?cited by 6
- 2026Beyond Visual Memory: Mechanistic Diagnostics of Latent Visual Reasoningcited by 4
- 2026Visual Enhanced Depth Scaling for Multimodal Latent Reasoningcited by 3
- 2026Breaking the Martingale Curse: Multi-Agent Debate via Asymmetric Cognitive Potential Energycited by 2
- 2026CoLVR: Enhancing Exploratory Latent Visual Reasoning via Contrastive Optimizationcited by 2
- 2026ReGuLaR: Relation-Grounded Latent Reasoning for Large Vision-Language Modelscited by 2
- 2026LUT: Latent Utility Training for Visual Reasoningcited by 2
- 2026Reason Through the Latent! Making Latent Visual Reasoning Necessarycited by 1
- 2026VideoLatent: Video-Language Learning via Latent Self-Forcingcited by 0
- 2026OPLD: On-Policy Latent Distillation for Multimodal Reasoningcited by 0
- 2026Rethinking Latent Visual Reasoning: Grounding Latent Reasoning in Visual Evidencecited by 0
12 most cited of 13 All 13 (JSON)
- 2026Soft Spatial Reasoning30 Sep 2026
- 2026Rethinking Latent Visual Reasoning: Grounding Latent Reasoning in Visual Evidence28 Sep 2026
- 2026Reason Through the Latent! Making Latent Visual Reasoning Necessary6 Sep 2026
- 2026LUT: Latent Utility Training for Visual Reasoning1 Aug 2026
- 2026OPLD: On-Policy Latent Distillation for Multimodal Reasoning30 Jul 2026
- 2026VideoLatent: Video-Language Learning via Latent Self-Forcing22 Jun 2026
- 2026Beyond Visual Memory: Mechanistic Diagnostics of Latent Visual Reasoning31 May 2026
- 2026ReGuLaR: Relation-Grounded Latent Reasoning for Large Vision-Language Models28 May 2026
- 2026What's Holding Back Latent Visual Reasoning?18 May 2026
- 2026CoLVR: Enhancing Exploratory Latent Visual Reasoning via Contrastive Optimization9 May 2026
- 2026HyLaR: Hybrid Latent Reasoning with Decoupled Policy Optimization22 Apr 2026
- 2026Visual Enhanced Depth Scaling for Multimodal Latent Reasoning12 Apr 2026
12 newest of 13 All 13 (JSON)
Similar, not cited
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