mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

UniVR: Thinking in Visual Space for Unified Visual Reasoning

arXiv 2607.12800 ↗First posted 14 Jul 2026cs.CVcited by 0

On the map: LLM reasoning → Multimodal reasoning

Abstract (arXiv)

Learning broad world knowledge directly from raw visual data is a fundamental capability of intelligence. We introduce UniVR, the first investigation into simultaneously learning complex reasoning, fine-grained physical dynamics, and long-term planning from pure visual demonstrations. At its core, UniVR features VR-GRPO, a reinforcement learning paradigm with complementary global and step-level rewards. This approach enforces logical coherence and physical consistency throughout the reasoning process without requiring task-specific heuristics or image-text pairs. To train and evaluate UniVR, we construct VR-X, a large-scale benchmark curated from 16 diverse sources spanning long-horizon manipulation, spatial puzzles, and physical reasoning. It is the first comprehensive suite to assess these heterogeneous capabilities under a purely visual protocol. Remarkably, UniVR achieves up to a 25% improvement on VR-X, and its superior visual reasoning also boosts performance on various multimodal understanding benchmarks. These findings underscore the vast potential of reasoning within visual spaces, with all code, data, and models are open-sourced for further research.

Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Multimodal reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning. Builds on 70 of its 103 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 14 Jul 2026.

Builds on

70 of 103 references.

Closest ancestors · 10

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2025Monet: Reasoning in Latent Visual Space Beyond Images and Language26 Nov
  2. 2025Chain-of-Visual-Thought: Teaching VLMs to See and Think Better with Continuous Visual Tokens24 Nov
  3. 2025Reasoning via Video: The First Evaluation of Video Models' Reasoning Abilities through Maze-Solving Tasks19 Nov
  4. 2025ThinkMorph: Emergent Properties in Multimodal Interleaved Chain-of-Thought Reasoning30 Oct
  5. 2025Latent Visual Reasoning29 Sep
  6. 2025Zebra-CoT: A Dataset for Interleaved Vision Language Reasoning22 Jul
  7. 2025Video-R1: Reinforcing Video Reasoning in MLLMs27 Mar
  8. 2025Reason-RFT: Reinforcement Fine-Tuning for Visual Reasoning of Vision Language Models26 Mar
  9. 2025Seg-Zero: Reasoning-Chain Guided Segmentation via Cognitive Reinforcement9 Mar
  10. 2023MathVista: Evaluating Mathematical Reasoning of Foundation Models in Visual Contexts3 Oct

Other references · 60

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  3. 2023Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Modelscited by 12,865
  4. 2024DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Modelscited by 8,851
  5. 2025Qwen3 Technical Reportcited by 8,195
  6. 2025DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learningcited by 6,146
  7. 2025Qwen2.5-VL Technical Reportcited by 5,418
  8. 2025Gemini 2.5: Pushing the Frontier with Advanced Reasoning, Multimodality, Long Context, and Next Generation Agentic Capabilitiescited by 3,655
  9. 2023Qwen Technical Reportcited by 3,273
  10. 2023Mistral 7Bcited by 3,065
  11. 2025DAPO: An Open-Source LLM Reinforcement Learning System at Scalecited by 2,678
  12. 2025Qwen3-VL Technical Reportcited by 2,534
38 more
  1. 2024Qwen2 Technical Reportcited by 2,076
  2. 2023MME: A Comprehensive Evaluation Benchmark for Multimodal Large Language Modelscited by 1,624
  3. 2023MM-Vet: Evaluating Large Multimodal Models for Integrated Capabilitiescited by 1,221
  4. 2018Towards Accurate Generative Models of Video: A New Metric & Challengescited by 1,204
  5. 2025SigLIP 2: Multilingual Vision-Language Encoders with Improved Semantic Understanding, Localization, and Dense Featurescited by 1,127
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  12. 2024DROID: A Large-Scale In-The-Wild Robot Manipulation Datasetcited by 801
  13. 2025Janus-Pro: Unified Multimodal Understanding and Generation with Data and Model Scalingcited by 787
  14. 2024Training Large Language Models to Reason in a Continuous Latent Spacecited by 763
  15. 2024Emu3: Next-Token Prediction is All You Needcited by 761
  16. 2025V-JEPA 2: Self-Supervised Video Models Enable Understanding, Prediction and Planningcited by 738
  17. 2022Automatic Chain of Thought Prompting in Large Language Modelscited by 684
  18. 2025Flow-GRPO: Training Flow Matching Models via Online RLcited by 605
  19. 2025AgiBot World Colosseo: A Large-scale Manipulation Platform for Scalable and Intelligent Embodied Systemscited by 390
  20. 2025DanceGRPO: Unleashing GRPO on Visual Generationcited by 388
  21. 2025Show-o2: Improved Native Unified Multimodal Modelscited by 242
  22. 2025MMaDA: Multimodal Large Diffusion Language Modelscited by 241
  23. 2025OmniGen2: Towards Instruction-Aligned Multimodal Generationcited by 241
  24. 2025Unified Reward Model for Multimodal Understanding and Generationcited by 194
  25. 2025EgoDex: Learning Dexterous Manipulation from Large-Scale Egocentric Videocited by 191
  26. 2025GAIA-2: A Controllable Multi-View Generative World Model for Autonomous Drivingcited by 178
  27. 2024Teaching Large Language Models to Reason with Reinforcement Learningcited by 158
  28. 2025Ctrl-World: A Controllable Generative World Model for Robot Manipulationcited by 149
  29. 2026Qwen3.5-Omni Technical Reportcited by 146
  30. 2022Text and Patterns: For Effective Chain of Thought, It Takes Two to Tangocited by 128
  31. 2025Emu3.5: Native Multimodal Models are World Learnerscited by 119
  32. 2025Pref-GRPO: Pairwise Preference Reward-based GRPO for Stable Text-to-Image Reinforcement Learningcited by 88
  33. 2025Reasoning Beyond Language: A Comprehensive Survey on Latent Chain-of-Thought Reasoningcited by 72
  34. 2026WorldArena: A Unified Benchmark for Evaluating Perception and Functional Utility of Embodied World Modelscited by 68
  35. 2025ILLUME+: Illuminating Unified MLLM with Dual Visual Tokenization and Diffusion Refinementcited by 53
  36. 2025OneCAT: Decoder-Only Auto-Regressive Model for Unified Understanding and Generationcited by 50
  37. 2026Rethinking Video Generation Model for the Embodied Worldcited by 30
  38. 2025Uni-MMMU: A Massive Multi-discipline Multimodal Unified Benchmarkcited by 28

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  4. 2026VBVR-Pro: A Scalable and Verifiable Suite for Native Visual Reasoning
  5. 2026Unfold The World: Factorize 4D Properties in Reinforcing Spatial Reasoning
  6. 2026Self-supervised Hierarchical Visual Reasoning with World Model
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