Thinking with Images as Continuous Actions: Numerical Visual Chain-of-Thought
Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Chalmers University of Technology（楚克理工大学）；University of Gothenburg（哥德堡大学）
Recent MLLMs increasingly rely on visual chain-of-thought to perform region-grounded reasoning over images. However, existing approaches ground regions via either textified coordinates (causing modality mismatch and semantic fragmentation) or fixed-granularity patches that both limit precise region selection and often require non-trivial architectural changes. In this paper, we propose Numerical Visual Chain-of-Thought (NV-CoT), a framework that enables MLLMs to reason over images using continuous numerical coordinates. NV-CoT expands the MLLM action space from discrete vocabulary tokens to a continuous Euclidean space, allowing models to directly generate bounding-box coordinates as actions with only minimal architectural modification. The framework supports both supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning. In particular, we replace categorical token policies with a Gaussian (or Laplace) policy over coordinates and introduce stochasticity via reparameterized sampling, making NV-CoT fully compatible with GRPO-style policy optimization. Extensive experiments on three benchmarks against 11 representative visual reasoning baselines demonstrate that NV-CoT significantly improves localization precision and final answer accuracy, while also accelerating training convergence, validating the effectiveness of continuous-action visual reasoning in MLLMs. Project page: https://kesenzhao.github.io/NV-CoT/
Aligning Thoughts with Answers: Probability Rewards to Tame Thinking Drift
National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；A*STAR Institute of Advanced Intelligence and Computing, Singapore（新加坡科技研究局先进智能与计算研究所）；South China University of Technology（华南理工大学）；University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Google DeepMind（谷歌DeepMind）
How and What to Imagine? Visual Thinking in Unified Multimodal Models for Cross-View Spatial Reasoning
Mila - Québec AI Institute（蒙特利尔AI研究所）；Université de Montréal（蒙特利尔大学）；McGill University（麦吉尔大学）；ServiceNow AI Research（ServiceNow人工智能研究）；Canada CIFAR AI Chair（加拿大CIFAR人工智能主席）
TIR-Bench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Agentic Thinking-with-Images Reasoning
Shanghai AI Laboratory（上海人工智能实验室）；University of Southern California（南加州大学）；Emory University（埃默里大学）；Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；Rice University（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）
ConFoThinking: Consolidated Focused Attention Driven Thinking for Visual Question Answering
Wangxuan Institute of Computer Technology, Peking University, Beijing, China（北京大学王轩计算机技术研究所）；School of AI and Advanced Computing, Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, Suzhou, China（西安交通大学利物浦大学人工智能与高级计算学院）
Learning to Think Fast and Slow for Visual Language Models
Hong Kong Baptist University（香港 Baptist 大学）；Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence（北京人工智能研究院）；Institute of Automation, CAS（中国科学院自动化研究所）；University of Wisconsin-Madison（威斯康星大学麦迪逊分校）
Tree-of-Mixed-Thought: Combining Fast and Slow Thinking for Multi-hop Visual Reasoning
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；cmss.chinamobile.com（中移（苏州）软件技术有限公司）；Lin Gang Laboratory（林冈实验室）；ShanghaiTech University（上海科技大学）
Chatting with Images for Introspective Visual Thinking
NLPR, MAIS, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Nanjing University（南京大学）
Thinking with Gaze: Sequential Eye-Tracking as Visual Reasoning Supervision for Medical VLMs
School of Computing, University of Georgia（佐治亚大学计算机学院）；Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Texas, Arlington（德克萨斯大学阿灵顿分校计算机科学与工程系）；Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School（麻省总医院哈佛医学院）；Department of Biomedical Engineering, New Jersey Institute of Technology（新泽西理工学院生物医学工程系）
Thinking Without Images: Internalizing Visual Manipulation with On-Policy Self-Distillation
State Key Laboratory of Multimedia Information Processing, School of Computer Science, Peking University（北京大学计算机学院多媒体信息处理国家重点实验室）；Central South University（中南大学）；University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Peking University（北京大学）；Huawei Technologies（华为技术有限公司）
