VBVR-Pro: A Scalable and Verifiable Suite for Native Visual Reasoning
On the map: LLM reasoning → Multimodal reasoning
Abstract (arXiv)
Native visual reasoning treats visual generation as the medium of reasoning itself: visual states (i.e. images and videos) are not merely inputs to be understood or outputs to be rendered, but first-class substrates for problem solving beyond language. Yet progress remains bottlenecked by the lack of scalable training tasks, reliable feedback, and controlled comparisons across generative substrates. In this work, we introduce VBVR-Pro, a closed-loop testbed that makes native visual reasoning through generation trainable, verifiable, optimizable, and experimentally controllable. 1) Task scaling. VBVR-Pro turns visual reasoning into a controlled task space of 300 procedurally generated tasks. Models trained on VBVR-Pro show strong transfer beyond the proposed suite across seven external visual reasoning benchmarks such as RISE-Video, MME-CoF-Pro, and BabyVision. 2) Verifiable rewards. VBVR-Pro provides verifiable reward scorers for task-grounded evaluation. Through a systematic study of leading MLLMs as judges, we identify recurring failure modes of the prevalent VLM-as-a-judge paradigm. In contrast, the proposed scorers are grounded in deterministic, task-specific rules, achieve fine-grained alignment with human judgments. Importantly, they serve as reliable reward signals for large-scale multi-task reinforcement learning and demonstrate stronger post-RL performance across visual reasoning tasks. 3) Mechanism study. VBVR-Pro enables controlled modality studies across more than 30 image, video, and interleaved generators. Our analysis shows that video generation remains strongest for tasks requiring persistent spatiotemporal state tracking, while interleaved generation provides a compute-efficient alternative. Critically, ablations and probing suggest the presence of vision-native trajectories that are crucial to visual reasoning. We release all data, models, scorers, and code.
Key facts. Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Multimodal reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning. Builds on 66 of its 76 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 26 Aug 2026.
Builds on
66 of 76 references.
Closest ancestors · 30
Same direction, newest first
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- 2026MME-CoF-Pro: Evaluating Reasoning Coherence in Video Generative Models with Text and Visual Hints20 Mar
- 2026Demystifying Video Reasoning17 Mar
- 2026GRADE: Benchmarking Discipline-Informed Reasoning in Image Editing12 Mar
- 2026EndoCoT: Scaling Endogenous Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in Diffusion Models12 Mar
18 more
- 2026A Very Big Video Reasoning Suite23 Feb
- 2026Omni-R1: Towards the Unified Generative Paradigm for Multimodal Reasoning14 Jan
- 2026BabyVision: Visual Reasoning Beyond Language10 Jan
- 2025DiffThinker: Towards Generative Multimodal Reasoning with Diffusion Models30 Dec
- 2025Interleaved Latent Visual Reasoning with Selective Perceptual Modeling5 Dec
- 2025RULER-Bench: Probing Rule-based Reasoning Abilities of Next-level Video Generation Models for Vision Foundation Intelligence2 Dec
- 2025V-ReasonBench: Toward Unified Reasoning Benchmark Suite for Video Generation Models20 Nov
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- 2025When Visualizing is the First Step to Reasoning: MIRA, a Benchmark for Visual Chain-of-Thought4 Nov
- 2025ThinkMorph: Emergent Properties in Multimodal Interleaved Chain-of-Thought Reasoning30 Oct
- 2025Reasoning in the Dark: Interleaved Vision-Text Reasoning in Latent Space14 Oct
- 2025Video models are zero-shot learners and reasoners24 Sep
- 2025InternVL3.5: Advancing Open-Source Multimodal Models in Versatility, Reasoning, and Efficiency25 Aug
- 2025Zebra-CoT: A Dataset for Interleaved Vision Language Reasoning22 Jul
- 2025GLM-4.5V and GLM-4.1V-Thinking: Towards Versatile Multimodal Reasoning with Scalable Reinforcement Learning1 Jul
- 2025Machine Mental Imagery: Empower Multimodal Reasoning with Latent Visual Tokens20 Jun
- 2025Imagine while Reasoning in Space: Multimodal Visualization-of-Thought13 Jan
- 2024Visual Sketchpad: Sketching as a Visual Chain of Thought for Multimodal Language Models13 Jun
Other references · 36
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- 2023C-Pack: Packed Resources For General Chinese Embeddingscited by 578
- 2024FlashAttention-3: Fast and Accurate Attention with Asynchrony and Low-precisioncited by 519
- 2023UniPC: A Unified Predictor-Corrector Framework for Fast Sampling of Diffusion Modelscited by 450
- 2025DanceGRPO: Unleashing GRPO on Visual Generationcited by 413
- 2026Gemma 4 Technical Reportcited by 259
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- 2026Qwen-Image-2.0 Technical Reportcited by 36
- 2025RealUnify: Do Unified Models Truly Benefit from Unification? A Comprehensive Benchmarkcited by 33
- 2025VChain: Chain-of-Visual-Thought for Reasoning in Video Generationcited by 32
- 2026SenseNova-U1: Unifying Multimodal Understanding and Generation with NEO-unify Architecturecited by 32
- 2024OpenING: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Judging Open-ended Interleaved Image-Text Generationcited by 31
- 2025Uni-MMMU: A Massive Multi-discipline Multimodal Unified Benchmarkcited by 29
- 2026OmniWeaving: Towards Unified Video Generation with Free-form Composition and Reasoningcited by 27
- 2025TRAVL: A Recipe for Making Video-Language Models Better Judges of Physics Implausibilitycited by 18
- 2025Is Your Video Language Model a Reliable Judge?cited by 14
- 2026UniGRPO: Unified Policy Optimization for Reasoning-Driven Visual Generationcited by 13
- 2026RISE-Video: Can Video Generators Decode Implicit World Rules?cited by 10
- 2025RealDPO: Real or Not Real, that is the Preferencecited by 6
- 2026AdaGRPO: A Capability-Aware Adaptive Enhancement for Flow-based GRPOcited by 2
- 2026Concurrent Image Understanding and Generation: Self-Correcting Coupled Markov Jump Processescited by 1
Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2026: 6.
6 papers.
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- 2026Training Object Permanence in World Modelscited by 0
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- 2026VR-JEPA: Learning Contrastive-State Latent Guidance for Generation-based Video Reasoningcited by 0
- 2026ProAR: Learning Prospective Reasoning with Autoregressive Video Modelscited by 0
- 2026Game2Real-Bench: Do Toy Games Reveal and Transfer to Real-World Visual Reasoning?cited by 0
- 2026Game2Real-Bench: Do Toy Games Reveal and Transfer to Real-World Visual Reasoning?13 Oct 2026
- 2026ProAR: Learning Prospective Reasoning with Autoregressive Video Models2 Oct 2026
- 2026VR-JEPA: Learning Contrastive-State Latent Guidance for Generation-based Video Reasoning30 Sep 2026
- 2026Scaling Video Generation for Reasoning: At What Cost?29 Sep 2026
- 2026Training Object Permanence in World Models23 Sep 2026
- 2026SenseNova-U1.5: Towards Native Unified Visual Intelligence10 Sep 2026
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