# History-Guided Iterative Visual Reasoning with Self-Correction

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.04413 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.04413/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Multimodal reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 13 of its 31 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Feb 2026.

## 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, 13 of 13)

- [Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.08361/) (2020)
- [Self-Consistency Improves Chain of Thought Reasoning in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11171/) (2022)
- [Qwen Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16609/) (2023)
- [Training Compute-Optimal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15556/) (2022)
- [LLaVA-OneVision: Easy Visual Task Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03326/) (2024)
- [Training Language Models to Self-Correct via Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12917/) (2024)
- [Complexity-Based Prompting for Multi-Step Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.00720/) (2022)
- [Cognitive Behaviors that Enable Self-Improving Reasoners, or, Four Habits of Highly Effective STaRs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.01307/) (2025)
- [Rethinking Reflection in Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.04022/) (2025)
- [S2R: Teaching LLMs to Self-verify and Self-correct via Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.12853/) (2025)
- [Core Knowledge Deficits in Multi-Modal Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.10855/) (2024)
- [Understanding Retrieval-Augmented Task Adaptation for Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.01468/) (2024)
- [Bootstrapping Task Spaces for Self-Improvement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.04575/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Self-consistency methods are the core technique for improving the reasoning reliability of multimodal large language models (MLLMs). By generating multiple reasoning results through repeated sampling and selecting the best answer via voting, they play an important role in cross-modal tasks. However, most existing self-consistency methods are limited to a fixed ``repeated sampling and voting'' paradigm and do not reuse historical reasoning information. As a result, models struggle to actively correct visual understanding errors and dynamically adjust their reasoning during iteration. Inspired by the human reasoning behavior of repeated verification and dynamic error correction, we propose the H-GIVR framework. During iterative reasoning, the MLLM observes the image multiple times and uses previously generated answers as references for subsequent steps, enabling dynamic correction of errors and improving answer accuracy. We conduct comprehensive experiments on five datasets and three models. The results show that the H-GIVR framework can significantly improve cross-modal reasoning accuracy while maintaining low computational cost. For instance, using textttLlama3.2-vision:11b on the ScienceQA dataset, the model requires an average of 2.57 responses per question to achieve an accuracy of 78.90%, representing a 107% improvement over the baseline.