Latent Chain-of-Thought for Visual Reasoning

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2510.23925v2
• Date: Wed, 29 Oct 2025 18:48:20 GMT
• Title: Latent Chain-of-Thought for Visual Reasoning
• Authors: Guohao Sun, Hang Hua, Jian Wang, Jiebo Luo, Sohail Dianat, Majid Rabbani, Raghuveer Rao, Zhiqiang Tao,
• Abstract summary: Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning is critical for improving the interpretability and reliability of Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs)<n>We reformulate reasoning in LVLMs as posterior inference and propose a scalable training algorithm based on amortized variational inference.<n>We empirically demonstrate that the proposed method enhances the state-of-the-art LVLMs on seven reasoning benchmarks.
• Score: 53.541579327424046
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning is critical for improving the interpretability and reliability of Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs). However, existing training algorithms such as SFT, PPO, and GRPO may not generalize well across unseen reasoning tasks and heavily rely on a biased reward model. To address this challenge, we reformulate reasoning in LVLMs as posterior inference and propose a scalable training algorithm based on amortized variational inference. By leveraging diversity-seeking reinforcement learning algorithms, we introduce a novel sparse reward function for token-level learning signals that encourage diverse, high-likelihood latent CoT, overcoming deterministic sampling limitations and avoiding reward hacking. Additionally, we implement a Bayesian inference-scaling strategy that replaces costly Best-of-N and Beam Search with a marginal likelihood to efficiently rank optimal rationales and answers. We empirically demonstrate that the proposed method enhances the state-of-the-art LVLMs on seven reasoning benchmarks, in terms of effectiveness, generalization, and interpretability.

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