mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

VBVR-Pro: A Scalable and Verifiable Suite for Native Visual Reasoning

arXiv 2608.26105 ↗First posted 26 Aug 2026cs.CV cs.AI cs.LGcited by 6

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

  1. 2026VGI-Bench: Probing Visual Intelligence in Video Generation Models20 Aug
  2. 2026OpenCoF: Learning to Reason Through Video Generation9 Jul
  3. 2026DeltaV: Thinking with Visual State Updates in Unified Large Multimodal Models9 Jul
  4. 2026Bridging Interleaved Multi-Modal Reasoning as a Unified Decision Process4 Jul
  5. 2026VLMs are Good Teachers for Video Reasoning via Adaptive Test-Time Optimization1 Jun
  6. 2026ETCHR: Editing To Clarify and Harness Reasoning22 May
  7. 2026Video Models Can Reason with Verifiable Rewards14 May
  8. 2026Video Models Reason Early: Exploiting Plan Commitment for Maze Solving31 Mar
  9. 2026MME-CoF-Pro: Evaluating Reasoning Coherence in Video Generative Models with Text and Visual Hints20 Mar
  10. 2026Demystifying Video Reasoning17 Mar
  11. 2026GRADE: Benchmarking Discipline-Informed Reasoning in Image Editing12 Mar
  12. 2026EndoCoT: Scaling Endogenous Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in Diffusion Models12 Mar
18 more
  1. 2026A Very Big Video Reasoning Suite23 Feb
  2. 2026Omni-R1: Towards the Unified Generative Paradigm for Multimodal Reasoning14 Jan
  3. 2026BabyVision: Visual Reasoning Beyond Language10 Jan
  4. 2025DiffThinker: Towards Generative Multimodal Reasoning with Diffusion Models30 Dec
  5. 2025Interleaved Latent Visual Reasoning with Selective Perceptual Modeling5 Dec
  6. 2025RULER-Bench: Probing Rule-based Reasoning Abilities of Next-level Video Generation Models for Vision Foundation Intelligence2 Dec
  7. 2025V-ReasonBench: Toward Unified Reasoning Benchmark Suite for Video Generation Models20 Nov
  8. 2025Thinking with Video: Video Generation as a Promising Multimodal Reasoning Paradigm6 Nov
  9. 2025When Visualizing is the First Step to Reasoning: MIRA, a Benchmark for Visual Chain-of-Thought4 Nov
  10. 2025ThinkMorph: Emergent Properties in Multimodal Interleaved Chain-of-Thought Reasoning30 Oct
  11. 2025Reasoning in the Dark: Interleaved Vision-Text Reasoning in Latent Space14 Oct
  12. 2025Video models are zero-shot learners and reasoners24 Sep
  13. 2025InternVL3.5: Advancing Open-Source Multimodal Models in Versatility, Reasoning, and Efficiency25 Aug
  14. 2025Zebra-CoT: A Dataset for Interleaved Vision Language Reasoning22 Jul
  15. 2025GLM-4.5V and GLM-4.1V-Thinking: Towards Versatile Multimodal Reasoning with Scalable Reinforcement Learning1 Jul
  16. 2025Machine Mental Imagery: Empower Multimodal Reasoning with Latent Visual Tokens20 Jun
  17. 2025Imagine while Reasoning in Space: Multimodal Visualization-of-Thought13 Jan
  18. 2024Visual Sketchpad: Sketching as a Visual Chain of Thought for Multimodal Language Models13 Jun

Other references · 36

  1. 2021Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervisioncited by 33,744
  2. 2023DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervisioncited by 7,974
  3. 2025Wan: Open and Advanced Large-Scale Video Generative Modelscited by 2,708
  4. 2024CogVideoX: Text-to-Video Diffusion Models with An Expert Transformercited by 2,261
  5. 2024HunyuanVideo: A Systematic Framework For Large Video Generative Modelscited by 1,660
  6. 2025Emerging Properties in Unified Multimodal Pretrainingcited by 897
  7. 2025Flow-GRPO: Training Flow Matching Models via Online RLcited by 661
  8. 2023C-Pack: Packed Resources For General Chinese Embeddingscited by 578
  9. 2024FlashAttention-3: Fast and Accurate Attention with Asynchrony and Low-precisioncited by 519
  10. 2023UniPC: A Unified Predictor-Corrector Framework for Fast Sampling of Diffusion Modelscited by 450
  11. 2025DanceGRPO: Unleashing GRPO on Visual Generationcited by 413
  12. 2026Gemma 4 Technical Reportcited by 259
24 more
  1. 2025AReaL: A Large-Scale Asynchronous Reinforcement Learning System for Language Reasoningcited by 250
  2. 2026LTX-2: Efficient Joint Audio-Visual Foundation Modelcited by 236
  3. 2025DiffusionNFT: Online Diffusion Reinforcement with Forward Processcited by 230
  4. 2025Do generative video models understand physical principles?cited by 161
  5. 2026Seedance 2.0: Advancing Video Generation for World Complexitycited by 160
  6. 2024Liger Kernel: Efficient Triton Kernels for LLM Trainingcited by 130
  7. 2025Envisioning Beyond the Pixels: Benchmarking Reasoning-Informed Visual Editingcited by 99
  8. 2025Visual Planning: Let's Think Only with Imagescited by 85
  9. 2025KRIS-Bench: Benchmarking Next-Level Intelligent Image Editing Modelscited by 71
  10. 2025Coefficients-Preserving Sampling for Reinforcement Learning with Flow Matchingcited by 56
  11. 2026Qwen-Image-2.0 Technical Reportcited by 36
  12. 2025RealUnify: Do Unified Models Truly Benefit from Unification? A Comprehensive Benchmarkcited by 33
  13. 2025VChain: Chain-of-Visual-Thought for Reasoning in Video Generationcited by 32
  14. 2026SenseNova-U1: Unifying Multimodal Understanding and Generation with NEO-unify Architecturecited by 32
  15. 2024OpenING: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Judging Open-ended Interleaved Image-Text Generationcited by 31
  16. 2025Uni-MMMU: A Massive Multi-discipline Multimodal Unified Benchmarkcited by 29
  17. 2026OmniWeaving: Towards Unified Video Generation with Free-form Composition and Reasoningcited by 27
  18. 2025TRAVL: A Recipe for Making Video-Language Models Better Judges of Physics Implausibilitycited by 18
  19. 2025Is Your Video Language Model a Reliable Judge?cited by 14
  20. 2026UniGRPO: Unified Policy Optimization for Reasoning-Driven Visual Generationcited by 13
  21. 2026RISE-Video: Can Video Generators Decode Implicit World Rules?cited by 10
  22. 2025RealDPO: Real or Not Real, that is the Preferencecited by 6
  23. 2026AdaGRPO: A Capability-Aware Adaptive Enhancement for Flow-based GRPOcited by 2
  24. 2026Concurrent Image Understanding and Generation: Self-Correcting Coupled Markov Jump Processescited by 1

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 6.

6 papers.

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2026Vero: An Open RL Recipe for General Visual Reasoning
  2. 2023See, Think, Confirm: Interactive Prompting Between Vision and Language Models for Knowledge-based Visual Reasoning
  3. 2026From Evaluation to Enhancement: Benchmarking and Improving Think-with-Video Reasoning for Video Generative Models
  4. 2026Thinking in Pictures: A Systematic Benchmark for Reasoning-driven Image Generation
  5. 2025On Data Synthesis and Post-training for Visual Abstract Reasoning
  6. 2026CollabVR: Collaborative Video Reasoning with Vision-Language and Video Generation Models
  7. 2025VR-Thinker: Boosting Video Reward Models through Thinking-with-Image Reasoning
  8. 2024From the Least to the Most: Building a Plug-and-Play Visual Reasoner via Data Synthesis