Multimodal discrete diffusion language models (dLLMs) generate responses through iterative mask prediction and offer a promising alternative to autoregressive large vision-language models. However, they still suffer from hallucination, producing outputs that are plausible under language priors but insufficiently grounded in the image. We argue that hallucination in multimodal dLLMs is not only a token prediction problem, but also a premature commitment problem: during iterative denoising, some masked positions are unmasked too early because their confidence is driven more by language priors than by visual evidence, and these early commitments can bias later generation. To address this issue, we propose Visual Gain Ordering (VIGOR), a training-free and plug-and-play inference strategy that reorders masked positions according to counterfactual visual evidence. At each denoising step, VIGOR compares the confidence of each candidate token under the original image-conditioned pass and an additional visual-ablation pass, and prioritizes positions whose predictions are more strongly supported by the image. Experiments on LLaDA-V and Lumina-DiMOO show that VIGOR consistently reduces hallucination and improves multimodal reasoning performance across benchmarks. Code is available at https://github.com/THU-BPM/Vigor.
In an era defined by the explosive growth of data and rapid technological advancements, Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) stand at the forefront of artificial intelligence (AI) systems. Designed to seamlessly integrate diverse data types-including text, images, videos, audio, and physiological sequences-MLLMs address the complexities of real-world applications far beyond the capabilities of single-modality systems. In this paper, we systematically sort out the applications of MLLM in multimodal tasks such as natural language, vision, and audio. We also provide a comparative analysis of the focus of different MLLMs in the tasks, and provide insights into the shortcomings of current MLLMs, and suggest potential directions for future research. Through these discussions, this paper hopes to provide valuable insights for the further development and application of MLLM.
Shu Wei, Jingjing Wu, Qunyi Xie, Lingshu Zhang, Xiangcheng Du, Yannian Fu, Mengjie Wang, Zuyi Wang 等 12 位作者
Unlimited OCR ushers the era of long-horizon parsing, substantially mitigating the growth of working memory as document lengthens. However, as document length scales to hundreds of pages, the visual context grows substantially, sharply increasing the computational cost of each decoding step and limiting the scalability of ultra-long document parsing. Inspired by human book transcription via localized focus without re-scanning preceding pages, we introduce Unlimited OCR 2, a document parsing model that looks only at what it transcribes. Building on Unlimited OCR, we upgrade all the decoder attention modules to Sparse Reference Sliding Window Attention (SR-SWA), bounding active reference tokens to a fixed capacity and thus sustaining constant computational costs across arbitrarily long documents. By combining SR-SWA with Unlimited-Horizon Decoding Paradigm, Unlimited OCR 2 enables document parsing over virtually unlimited lengths without prohibitive memory overhead. At the hundred-page scale, Unlimited OCR 2 achieves 7.0$\times$ and 5.6$\times$ per-step speedups over Full Attention and R-SWA, respectively. Furthermore, it delivers state-of-the-art end-to-end performance on both MPDocBench and MarathonDocBench, our newly proposed benchmark targeting hundred-page document parsing. Ultimately, the capacity for uninterrupted, one-shot document parsing signifies a fundamental paradigm shift into the OCR 3.0 era.
Multimodal large language models have made substantial progress in visual question answering, but complex visual reasoning often requires locating and comparing multiple pieces of question-relevant visual evidence. Existing methods that move intermediate reasoning into the visual latent space usually follow a single linear reasoning trajectory, which can be limiting when multiple visual hypotheses or competing evidence regions are relevant. We propose Latent Visual Contrastive Reasoning, a branch-aware latent reasoning framework that generates multiple question-conditioned latent visual branches as soft hypotheses over image tokens. To train these branches, our method uses bounding-box evidence annotations to build target evidence representations and introduces a soft contrastive branch-evidence alignment objective. This objective encourages evidence-relevant branches to align with annotated visual regions while contrasting them against negative evidence. We instantiate our method on Qwen2.5-VL backbones and train it with standard supervised fine-tuning. Experiments on perception-intensive visual reasoning benchmarks show that the proposed method achieves overall improvements over the corresponding backbone and single-path latent reasoning baselines at both 3B and 7B scales.
When a robot faces unfamiliar physical conditions, a common approach is to collect evidence about what changed and adapt. For such diagnosis to improve behavior, six ordered empirical conditions must hold: a meaningful reference, identifiability of the physical condition, use of the acquired evidence, decision value, selection value over a fixed alternative, and safe realization. We test this chain in controlled and public environments. In our controlled environments the frozen policy chooses correctly on every decision, but which evidence it buys is fixed by how the panels assign decisions to evidence strata. On three mechanisms absent from training, the frozen decoder fails its registered transfer gate. On all 96 decisions of the transfer panel, its full-trace input lies far outside its training range, and on such inputs it returns one answer whatever the trace contains. All 15 of its errors fall in the 30 decisions from which cheaper evidence was removed by design, a split hidden by aggregate accuracy. None of three primary public tasks passes its registered qualification gates. Before attributing a failure to how a frozen model uses evidence, evaluation should therefore check whether its deployment inputs lie inside its training range.
Jiawei Liu, Qisi Chen, Jianshu Zhang, Quan Liu, Defu Lian University of Science and Technology of China
Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at complex reasoning through search algorithms, yet current strategies often suffer from massive token consumption due to redundant exploration of semantically equivalent steps. Existing semantic similarity methods struggle to accurately identify such equivalence in domain-specific contexts like mathematical reasoning. To address this, we propose EquivPruner, a simple yet effective approach that identifies and prunes semantically equivalent actions during LLM reasoning search. We also introduce MathEquiv, the first dataset we created for mathematical statement equivalence, which enables the training of a lightweight equivalence detector. Extensive experiments across various models and tasks demonstrate that EquivPruner significantly reduces token consumption, improving searching efficiency and often bolstering reasoning accuracy. For instance, when applied to Qwen2.5-Math-7B-Instruct on GSM8K, EquivPruner reduced token consumption by 48.1% while also improving accuracy. Our code is available at https://github.com/Lolo1222/EquivPruner.
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Rui Wang, Ce Zhang Carnegie Mellon University, Jun-Yu Ma, Jianshu Zhang, Hongru Wang, Yi Chen, Boyang Xue, Tianqing Fang Tencent AI Lab 等 13 位作者
The hallmark of Deep Research agents lies in compositional reasoning, the capacity to aggregate distributed, heterogeneous information into coherent logical insights. However, current agentic systems are often retrieval-heavy but reasoning-light, where success is predominantly determined by simple entity-seeking rather than the multi-step aggregation of scattered evidence. To address this, we propose a data synthesis pipeline WebAggregator, designed to shift the agentic paradigm from retrieval-centric to compositional aggregation. Our approach first employs Proactive Explorer to collect interconnected knowledge, then Compositional Logic Proposer to weave knowledge into complex questions using over 12 composition guidelines derived from a rigorous deconstruction of the Deep Research problem setting. Fine-tuning on this corpus fundamentally transforms agent behavior, fostering deliberate composition reasoning and reduced tool redundancy. The resulting WebAggregator-32B surpasses GPT-4.1 and matches Claude-3.7-Sonnet on GAIA, WebWalkerQA, and XBench. To address the lack of benchmarks that emphasize both reasoning and retrieval, we introduce the WebAggregatorQA testbed, which reveals that even with perfect retrieval, top-tier models still underperformed. These results demonstrate that compositional reasoning, not retrieval, is the true performance ceiling for next-generation research agents.
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cs.CL · cs.AI
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Jianshu Zhang, Chengxuan Qian University of California, Santa Barbara, Haosen Sun, Haoran Lu Northwestern University, Dingcheng Wang Northwestern University, Letian Xue Northwestern University, Northwestern University, Han Liu Northwestern University
Estimating task progress requires long-horizon and dynamic reasoning, going beyond static visual perception. Although Vision-Language Models (VLMs) excel at describing what is visible in a single observation, it remains unclear whether they can infer how far a task has progressed from partial information. To study this question, we introduce Progress-Bench, a benchmark with over 3K instances for evaluating progress reasoning from a single observation. We further examine a human-inspired two-stage paradigm that combines episodic retrieval with mental simulation. We instantiate this paradigm through both training-free prompting and a training-based approach using the automatically curated ProgressLM-45K dataset. Experiments on 14 VLMs show that most models struggle with reliable progress estimation, and that training-free reasoning provides only limited and model-dependent benefits. In contrast, the training-based ProgressLM-3B achieves consistent improvements in accuracy, robustness to viewpoint variation, and handling of unanswerable cases, despite its small scale. Additional analyses reveal common failure patterns in existing VLMs and clarify when and why progress reasoning succeeds or fails.
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cs.CL · cs.CV
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表