# Think, Look, and Revise: Inconsistency-Aware Visual Self-Correction in MLLMs

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.29374 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.29374/

## 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 25 of its 27 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Aug 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, 25 of 25)

- [DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03300/) (2024)
- [Direct Preference Optimization: Your Language Model is Secretly a Reward Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18290/) (2023)
- [Improved Baselines with Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03744/) (2023)
- [LLaVA-OneVision: Easy Visual Task Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03326/) (2024)
- [MMMU: A Massive Multi-discipline Multimodal Understanding and Reasoning Benchmark for Expert AGI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16502/) (2023)
- [HybridFlow: A Flexible and Efficient RLHF Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.19256/) (2024)
- [InternVL3: Exploring Advanced Training and Test-Time Recipes for Open-Source Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.10479/) (2025)
- [MathVista: Evaluating Mathematical Reasoning of Foundation Models in Visual Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.02255/) (2023)
- [Depth Anything V2](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09414/) (2024)
- [Are We on the Right Way for Evaluating Large Vision-Language Models?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.20330/) (2024)
- [Cambrian-1: A Fully Open, Vision-Centric Exploration of Multimodal LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.16860/) (2024)
- [Eyes Wide Shut? Exploring the Visual Shortcomings of Multimodal LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.06209/) (2024)
- [ViperGPT: Visual Inference via Python Execution for Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08128/) (2023)
- [Visual Programming: Compositional visual reasoning without training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.11559/) (2022)
- [NVILA: Efficient Frontier Visual Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.04468/) (2024)
- [Teaching CLIP to Count to Ten](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.12066/) (2023)
- [Thyme: Think Beyond Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.11630/) (2025)
- [TallyQA: Answering Complex Counting Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.12440/) (2018)
- [GRIT: Teaching MLLMs to Think with Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.15879/) (2025)
- [SAT: Dynamic Spatial Aptitude Training for Multimodal Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.07755/) (2024)
- [PyVision: Agentic Vision with Dynamic Tooling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.07998/) (2025)
- [Perception Tokens Enhance Visual Reasoning in Multimodal Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.03548/) (2024)
- [MLLM-Tool: A Multimodal Large Language Model For Tool Agent Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10727/) (2024)
- [CodeDance: A Dynamic Tool-integrated MLLM for Executable Visual Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.17312/) (2025)
- [LATTE: Learning to Think with Vision Specialists](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.05479/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Tool-augmented multimodal reasoning integrates external tools (e.g., object detection, depth estimation) into multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to address perceptual bottlenecks in complex visual tasks. However, existing approaches rarely verify tool outputs, limiting their ability to detect and recover from tool failures. We propose ReVISE, a framework that equips MLLMs with verification and dynamic error recovery for tool-augmented reasoning. ReVISE introduces (1) a curated training dataset that supervises reflective behaviors, enabling models to validate tool-derived evidence, reformulate queries when visual mismatches arise, and fall back to intrinsic grounding when external tools are unreliable; and (2) a reinforcement learning based targeted rewards that encourage internal reflection and penalize spatial misalignment. Experiments on several benchmarks demonstrate consistent improvements over existing methods, highlighting the importance of error detection and correction in tool-augmented multimodal reasoning.
