Beyond Static Visual Tokens: Structured Sequential Visual Chain-of-Thought Reasoning

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2603.26737v1
• Date: Sat, 21 Mar 2026 20:13:15 GMT
• Title: Beyond Static Visual Tokens: Structured Sequential Visual Chain-of-Thought Reasoning
• Abstract summary: We propose Structural Sequential Visual CoT SSV-CoT.<n>First, a question-relevant saliency map identifies and organizes key visual regions, explicitly modeling the spatial distribution of visual importance.<n>Second, reasoning is performed following this discriminative order, inducing a curriculum-like semantic progression from primary to secondary cues.
• Score: 8.10005273393957
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
• Abstract: Current multimodal LLMs encode images as static visual prefixes and rely on text-based reasoning, lacking goal-driven and adaptive visual access. Inspired by human visual perception-where attention is selectively and sequentially shifted from the most informative regions to secondary cues-we propose Structural Sequential Visual CoT SSV-CoT. First, a question-relevant saliency map identifies and organizes key visual regions, explicitly modeling the spatial distribution of visual importance. Second, reasoning is performed following this discriminative order, inducing a curriculum-like semantic progression from primary to secondary cues. This method is trained end-to-end, using text cot and answer supervision, without relying on region-level annotations or specialized external tools. Experiments on diverse visual reasoning benchmarks show gains, validating structured and sequential visual cognition.

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