mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Forest Before Trees: Latent Superposition for Efficient Visual Reasoning

arXiv 2601.06803 ↗First posted 11 Jan 2026cs.CL cs.CVcited by 16

On the map: LLM reasoning → Multimodal reasoning

also in 1 more
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

  1. 2025Sketch-in-Latents: Eliciting Unified Reasoning in MLLMs18 Dec
  2. 2025Reasoning Within the Mind: Dynamic Multimodal Interleaving in Latent Space14 Dec
  3. 2025Interleaved Latent Visual Reasoning with Selective Perceptual Modeling5 Dec
  4. 2025Monet: Reasoning in Latent Visual Space Beyond Images and Language26 Nov
  5. 2025LaRe: Latent Refocusing for Multimodal Reasoning4 Nov
  6. 2025Latent Sketchpad: Sketching Visual Thoughts to Elicit Multimodal Reasoning in MLLMs28 Oct
  7. 2025Reasoning in the Dark: Interleaved Vision-Text Reasoning in Latent Space14 Oct
  8. 2025Latent Visual Reasoning29 Sep
  9. 2025InternVL3.5: Advancing Open-Source Multimodal Models in Versatility, Reasoning, and Efficiency25 Aug
  10. 2025Multimodal Chain of Continuous Thought for Latent-Space Reasoning in Vision-Language Models18 Aug
  11. 2025Perception-Aware Policy Optimization for Multimodal Reasoning8 Jul
  12. 2025Machine Mental Imagery: Empower Multimodal Reasoning with Latent Visual Tokens20 Jun
3 more
  1. 2025DeepEyes: Incentivizing "Thinking with Images" via Reinforcement Learning20 May
  2. 2025VL-Rethinker: Incentivizing Self-Reflection of Vision-Language Models with Reinforcement Learning10 Apr
  3. 2025Vision-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in Multimodal Large Language Models9 Mar

Other references · 10

  1. 2023GPT-4 Technical Reportcited by 18,132
  2. 2025Qwen2.5-VL Technical Reportcited by 5,418
  3. 2025Qwen3-VL Technical Reportcited by 2,534
  4. 2024Training Large Language Models to Reason in a Continuous Latent Spacecited by 763
  5. 2024Titans: Learning to Memorize at Test Timecited by 303
  6. 2024Quiet-STaR: Language Models Can Teach Themselves to Think Before Speakingcited by 292
  7. 2024SEED-Bench-2-Plus: Benchmarking Multimodal Large Language Models with Text-Rich Visual Comprehensioncited by 144
  8. 2025SoftCoT: Soft Chain-of-Thought for Efficient Reasoning with LLMscited by 110
  9. 2025Mull-Tokens: Modality-Agnostic Latent Thinkingcited by 15
  10. 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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  1. 2026Self-Consistent Latent Reasoning: Long Latent Sequence Reasoning for Vision-Language Model
  2. 2026Retrieve, Integrate, and Synthesize: Spatial-Semantic Grounded Latent Visual Reasoning
  3. 2026Vision-aligned Latent Reasoning for Multi-modal Large Language Model
  4. 2026Token-Disentangled Latent Test-Time Scaling for Vision-Language Reasoning
  5. 2026Fill the GAP: A Granular Alignment Paradigm for Visual Reasoning in Multimodal Large Language Models
  6. 2026Visual Latents Know More Than They Say: Unsilencing Latent Reasoning in MLLMs
  7. 2026Decompose, Look, and Reason: Reinforced Latent Reasoning for VLMs
  8. 2026LanteRn: Latent Visual Structured Reasoning