Beyond Visual CoT: Internalized Visual Thinking for Proactive Video Reasoning
Multimodal large language models increasingly use visual chain-of-thought (Visual CoT) to reason about spatial, temporal, and embodied environments. By generating intermediate reasoning images, Visual CoT provides an intuitive mechanism for visual foresight but introduces substantial inference overhead, which is particularly problematic for proactive video reasoning. We ask whether models can learn to think visually during training while reasoning directly at inference. We introduce Internalized Visual Thinking (IVT), a post-training framework that jointly optimizes textual prediction and…
Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) test-time computing have introduced the capability to perform intermediate chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning (thinking) before generating answers. While increasing the thinking budget yields smooth performance improvements at inference time, the relationship between LLM capability, query complexity, and optimal budget allocation remains poorly understood for…
Recently, there has been a lot of hullabaloo about the idea that large reasoning models (LRM) are unable to think. This is mostly due to a research article published by Apple, "The Illusion of Thinking" Apple argues that LRMs must not be able to think; instead, they just perform pattern-matching.…
Long chain-of-thought (CoT) significantly enhances large language models' (LLM) reasoning capabilities. However, the extensive reasoning traces lead to inefficiencies and an increased time-to-first-token (TTFT). We propose a novel training paradigm that uses reinforcement learning (RL) to guide reasoning LLMs to interleave thinking and answering for multi-hop questions. We observe that…