Synthetic Visual Genome

Reasoning over visual relationships-spatial, functional, interactional, social, etc.-is considered to be a fundamental component of human cognition. Yet, despite the major advances in visual comprehension in multimodal language models (MLMs), precise reasoning over relationships and their generations remains a challenge. We introduce ROBIN: an MLM instruction-tuned with densely annotated relationships capable of constructing high-quality dense scene graphs at scale. To train ROBIN, we curate SVG, a synthetic scene graph dataset by completing the missing relations of selected objects in existing scene graphs using a teacher MLM and a carefully designed filtering process to ensure high-quality. To generate more accurate and rich scene graphs at scale for any image, we introduce SG-EDIT: a self-distillation framework where GPT-4o further refines ROBIN's predicted scene graphs by removing unlikely relations and/or suggesting relevant ones. In total, our dataset contains 146K images and 5.6M relationships for 2.6M objects. Results show that our ROBIN-3B model, despite being trained on less than 3 million instances, outperforms similar-size models trained on over 300 million instances on relationship understanding benchmarks, and even surpasses larger models up to 13B parameters. Notably, it achieves state-of-the-art performance in referring expression comprehension with a score of 88.9, surpassing the previous best of 87.4. Our results suggest that training on the refined scene graph data is crucial to maintaining high performance across diverse visual reasoning task.

Audio-Aware Large Language Models as Judges for Speaking Styles

Audio-aware large language models (ALLMs) can understand the textual and non-textual information in the audio input. In this paper, we explore using ALLMs as an automatic judge to assess the speaking styles of speeches. We use ALLM judges to evaluate the speeches generated by SLMs on two tasks: voice style instruction following and role-playing. The speaking style we consider includes emotion, volume, speaking pace, word emphasis, pitch control, and non-verbal elements. We use four spoken language models (SLMs) to complete the two tasks and use humans and ALLMs to judge the SLMs' responses. We compare two ALLM judges, GPT-4o-audio and Gemini-2.5-pro, with human evaluation results and show that the agreement between Gemini and human judges is comparable to the agreement between human evaluators. These promising results show that ALLMs can be used as a judge to evaluate SLMs. Our results also reveal that current SLMs, even GPT-4o-audio, still have room for improvement in controlling the speaking style and generating natural dialogues.

Unfolding Spatial Cognition: Evaluating Multimodal Models on Visual Simulations

Spatial cognition is essential for human intelligence, enabling problem-solving through visual simulations rather than solely relying on verbal reasoning. However, existing AI benchmarks primarily assess verbal reasoning, neglecting the complexities of non-verbal, multi-step visual simulation. We introduce STARE(Spatial Transformations and Reasoning Evaluation), a benchmark designed to rigorously evaluate multimodal large language models on tasks better solved through multi-step visual simulation. STARE features 4K tasks spanning foundational geometric transformations (2D and 3D), integrated spatial reasoning (cube net folding and tangram puzzles), and real-world spatial reasoning (perspective and temporal reasoning), reflecting practical cognitive challenges like object assembly, mechanical diagram interpretation, and everyday spatial navigation. Our evaluations show that models excel at reasoning over simpler 2D transformations, but perform close to random chance on more complex tasks like 3D cube net folding and tangram puzzles that require multi-step visual simulations. Humans achieve near-perfect accuracy but take considerable time (up to 28.9s) on complex tasks, significantly speeding up (down by 7.5 seconds on average) with intermediate visual simulations. In contrast, models exhibit inconsistent performance gains from visual simulations, improving on most tasks but declining in specific cases like tangram puzzles (GPT-4o, o1) and cube net folding (Claude-3.5, Gemini-2.0 Flash), indicating that models may not know how to effectively leverage intermediate visual information.

Seeing is Not Reasoning: MVPBench for Graph-based Evaluation of Multi-path Visual Physical CoT

Understanding the physical world - governed by laws of motion, spatial relations, and causality - poses a fundamental challenge for multimodal large language models (MLLMs). While recent advances such as OpenAI o3 and GPT-4o demonstrate impressive perceptual and reasoning capabilities, our investigation reveals these models struggle profoundly with visual physical reasoning, failing to grasp basic physical laws, spatial interactions, and causal effects in complex scenes. More importantly, they often fail to follow coherent reasoning chains grounded in visual evidence, especially when multiple steps are needed to arrive at the correct answer. To rigorously evaluate this capability, we introduce MVPBench, a curated benchmark designed to rigorously evaluate visual physical reasoning through the lens of visual chain-of-thought (CoT). Each example features interleaved multi-image inputs and demands not only the correct final answer but also a coherent, step-by-step reasoning path grounded in evolving visual cues. This setup mirrors how humans reason through real-world physical processes over time. To ensure fine-grained evaluation, we introduce a graph-based CoT consistency metric that verifies whether the reasoning path of model adheres to valid physical logic. Additionally, we minimize shortcut exploitation from text priors, encouraging models to rely on visual understanding. Experimental results reveal a concerning trend: even cutting-edge MLLMs exhibit poor visual reasoning accuracy and weak image-text alignment in physical domains. Surprisingly, RL-based post-training alignment - commonly believed to improve visual reasoning performance - often harms spatial reasoning, suggesting a need to rethink current fine-tuning practices.

Are Unified Vision-Language Models Necessary: Generalization Across Understanding and Generation

Recent advancements in unified vision-language models (VLMs), which integrate both visual understanding and generation capabilities, have attracted significant attention. The underlying hypothesis is that a unified architecture with mixed training on both understanding and generation tasks can enable mutual enhancement between understanding and generation. However, this hypothesis remains underexplored in prior works on unified VLMs. To address this gap, this paper systematically investigates the generalization across understanding and generation tasks in unified VLMs. Specifically, we design a dataset closely aligned with real-world scenarios to facilitate extensive experiments and quantitative evaluations. We evaluate multiple unified VLM architectures to validate our findings. Our key findings are as follows. First, unified VLMs trained with mixed data exhibit mutual benefits in understanding and generation tasks across various architectures, and this mutual benefits can scale up with increased data. Second, better alignment between multimodal input and output spaces will lead to better generalization. Third, the knowledge acquired during generation tasks can transfer to understanding tasks, and this cross-task generalization occurs within the base language model, beyond modality adapters. Our findings underscore the critical necessity of unifying understanding and generation in VLMs, offering valuable insights for the design and optimization of unified VLMs.

FullFront: Benchmarking MLLMs Across the Full Front-End Engineering Workflow

Front-end engineering involves a complex workflow where engineers conceptualize designs, translate them into code, and iteratively refine the implementation. While recent benchmarks primarily focus on converting visual designs to code, we present FullFront, a benchmark designed to evaluate Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) \textbf{across the full front-end development pipeline}. FullFront assesses three fundamental tasks that map directly to the front-end engineering pipeline: Webpage Design (conceptualization phase), Webpage Perception QA (comprehension of visual organization and elements), and Webpage Code Generation (implementation phase). Unlike existing benchmarks that use either scraped websites with bloated code or oversimplified LLM-generated HTML, FullFront employs a novel, two-stage process to transform real-world webpages into clean, standardized HTML while maintaining diverse visual designs and avoiding copyright issues. Extensive testing of state-of-the-art MLLMs reveals significant limitations in page perception, code generation (particularly for image handling and layout), and interaction implementation. Our results quantitatively demonstrate performance disparities across models and tasks, and highlight a substantial gap between current MLLM capabilities and human expert performance in front-end engineering. The FullFront benchmark and code are available in https://github.com/Mikivishy/FullFront.

Point-RFT: Improving Multimodal Reasoning with Visually Grounded Reinforcement Finetuning

Recent advances in large language models have significantly improved textual reasoning through the effective use of Chain-of-Thought (CoT) and reinforcement learning. However, extending these successes to vision-language tasks remains challenging due to inherent limitations in text-only CoT, such as visual hallucinations and insufficient multimodal integration. In this paper, we introduce Point-RFT, a multimodal reasoning framework explicitly designed to leverage visually grounded CoT reasoning for visual document understanding. Our approach consists of two stages: First, we conduct format finetuning using a curated dataset of 71K diverse visual reasoning problems, each annotated with detailed, step-by-step rationales explicitly grounded to corresponding visual elements. Second, we employ reinforcement finetuning targeting visual document understanding. On ChartQA, our approach improves accuracy from 70.88% (format-finetuned baseline) to 90.04%, surpassing the 83.92% accuracy achieved by reinforcement finetuning relying solely on text-based CoT. The result shows that our grounded CoT is more effective for multimodal reasoning compared with the text-only CoT. Moreover, Point-RFT exhibits superior generalization capability across several out-of-domain visual document reasoning benchmarks, including CharXiv, PlotQA, IconQA, TabMWP, etc., and highlights its potential in complex real-world scenarios.

OpenThinkIMG: Learning to Think with Images via Visual Tool Reinforcement Learning

While humans can flexibly leverage interactive visual cognition for complex problem-solving, enabling Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) to learn similarly adaptive behaviors with visual tools remains challenging. A significant hurdle is the current lack of standardized infrastructure, which hinders integrating diverse tools, generating rich interaction data, and training robust agents effectively. To address these gaps, we introduce OpenThinkIMG, the first open-source, comprehensive end-to-end framework for tool-augmented LVLMs. It features standardized vision tool interfaces, scalable trajectory generation for policy initialization, and a flexible training environment. Furthermore, considering supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on static demonstrations offers limited policy generalization for dynamic tool invocation, we propose a novel reinforcement learning (RL) framework V-ToolRL to train LVLMs to learn adaptive policies for invoking external vision tools. V-ToolRL enables LVLMs to autonomously discover optimal tool-usage strategies by directly optimizing for task success using feedback from tool interactions. We empirically validate V-ToolRL on challenging chart reasoning tasks. Our RL-trained agent, built upon a Qwen2-VL-2B, significantly outperforms its SFT-initialized counterpart (+28.83 points) and surpasses established supervised tool-learning baselines like Taco and CogCom by an average of +12.7 points. Notably, it also surpasses prominent closed-source models like GPT-4.1 by +8.68 accuracy points. We hope OpenThinkIMG can serve as a foundational framework for advancing dynamic, tool-augmented visual reasoning, helping the community develop AI agents that can genuinely "think with images".

RAGEN: Understanding Self-Evolution in LLM Agents via Multi-Turn Reinforcement Learning

Training large language models (LLMs) as interactive agents presents unique challenges including long-horizon decision making and interacting with stochastic environment feedback. While reinforcement learning (RL) has enabled progress in static tasks, multi-turn agent RL training remains underexplored. We propose StarPO (State-Thinking-Actions-Reward Policy Optimization), a general framework for trajectory-level agent RL, and introduce RAGEN, a modular system for training and evaluating LLM agents. Our study on three stylized environments reveals three core findings. First, our agent RL training shows a recurring mode of Echo Trap where reward variance cliffs and gradient spikes; we address this with StarPO-S, a stabilized variant with trajectory filtering, critic incorporation, and decoupled clipping. Second, we find the shaping of RL rollouts would benefit from diverse initial states, medium interaction granularity and more frequent sampling. Third, we show that without fine-grained, reasoning-aware reward signals, agent reasoning hardly emerge through multi-turn RL and they may show shallow strategies or hallucinated thoughts. Code and environments are available at https://github.com/RAGEN-AI/RAGEN.

SoTA with Less: MCTS-Guided Sample Selection for Data-Efficient Visual Reasoning Self-Improvement

In this paper, we present an effective method to enhance visual reasoning with significantly fewer training samples, relying purely on self-improvement with no knowledge distillation. Our key insight is that the difficulty of training data during reinforcement fine-tuning (RFT) is critical. Appropriately challenging samples can substantially boost reasoning capabilities even when the dataset is small. Despite being intuitive, the main challenge remains in accurately quantifying sample difficulty to enable effective data filtering. To this end, we propose a novel way of repurposing Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) to achieve that. Starting from our curated 70k open-source training samples, we introduce an MCTS-based selection method that quantifies sample difficulty based on the number of iterations required by the VLMs to solve each problem. This explicit step-by-step reasoning in MCTS enforces the model to think longer and better identifies samples that are genuinely challenging. We filter and retain 11k samples to perform RFT on Qwen2.5-VL-7B-Instruct, resulting in our final model, ThinkLite-VL. Evaluation results on eight benchmarks show that ThinkLite-VL improves the average performance of Qwen2.5-VL-7B-Instruct by 7%, using only 11k training samples with no knowledge distillation. This significantly outperforms all existing 7B-level reasoning VLMs, and our fairly comparable baselines that use classic selection methods such as accuracy-based filtering. Notably, on MathVista, ThinkLite-VL-7B achieves the SoTA accuracy of 75.1, surpassing Qwen2.5-VL-72B, GPT-4o, and O1. Our code, data, and model are available at https://github.com/si0wang/ThinkLite-VL.