Problem Solving
GAM-Agent: Game-Theoretic and Uncertainty-Aware Collaboration for Complex Visual Reasoning
We propose GAM-Agent, a game-theoretic multi-agent framework for enhancing vision-language reasoning. Unlike prior single-agent or monolithic models, GAM-Agent formulates the reasoning process as a non-zero-sum game between base agents--each specializing in visual perception subtasks--and a critical agent that verifies logic consistency and factual correctness. Agents communicate via structured claims, evidence, and uncertainty estimates. The framework introduces an uncertainty-aware controller to dynamically adjust agent collaboration, triggering multi-round debates when disagreement or ambiguity is detected.
Reinforcing Spatial Reasoning in Vision-Language Models with Interwoven Thinking and Visual Drawing
As textual reasoning with large language models (LLMs) has advanced significantly, there has been growing interest in enhancing the multimodal reasoning capabilities of large vision-language models (LVLMs). However, existing methods primarily approach multimodal reasoning in a straightforward, text-centric manner, where both reasoning and answer derivation are conducted purely through text, with the only difference being the presence of multimodal input. As a result, these methods often encounter fundamental limitations in spatial reasoning tasks that demand precise geometric understanding and continuous spatial tracking--capabilities that humans achieve through mental visualization and manipulation. To address the limitations, we propose drawing to reason in space, a novel paradigm that enables LVLMs to reason through elementary drawing operations in the visual space. By equipping models with basic drawing operations, including annotating bounding boxes and drawing auxiliary lines, we empower them to express and analyze spatial relationships through direct visual manipulation, meanwhile avoiding the performance ceiling imposed by specialized perception tools in previous tool-integrated reasoning approaches. To cultivate this capability, we develop a three-stage training framework: cold-start training with synthetic data to establish basic drawing abilities, reflective rejection sampling to enhance self-reflection behaviors, and reinforcement learning to directly optimize for target rewards. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our model, named VILASR, consistently outperforms existing methods across diverse spatial reasoning benchmarks, involving maze navigation, static spatial reasoning, video-based reasoning, and multi-view-based reasoning tasks, with an average improvement of 18.4%. Ablation studies reveal the critical role of each training stage, where reflective rejection sampling strengthens the model's self-correction capabilities, and reinforcement learning effectively unlocks its reasoning potential.
World Models Should Prioritize the Unification of Physical and Social Dynamics
World models, which explicitly learn environmental dynamics to lay the foundation for planning, reasoning, and decision-making, are rapidly advancing in predicting both physical dynamics and aspects of social behavior, yet predominantly in separate silos. This division results in a systemic failure to model the crucial interplay between physical environments and social constructs, rendering current models fundamentally incapable of adequately addressing the true complexity of real-world systems where physical and social realities are inextricably intertwined. This position paper argues that the systematic, bidirectional unification of physical and social predictive capabilities is the next crucial frontier for world model development. We contend that comprehensive world models must holistically integrate objective physical laws with the subjective, evolving, and context-dependent nature of social dynamics. Such unification is paramount for AI to robustly navigate complex real-world challenges and achieve more generalizable intelligence.
OPENCUA: Open Foundations for Computer-Use Agents
Vision-language models have demonstrated impressive capabilities as computer-use agents (CUAs) capable of automating diverse computer tasks. As their commercial potential grows, critical details of the most capable CUA systems remain closed. As these agents will increasingly mediate digital interactions and execute consequential decisions on our behalf, the research community needs access to open CUA frameworks to study their capabilities, limitations, and risks. To bridge this gap, we propose OPENCUA, a comprehensive open-source framework for scaling CUA data and foundation models. Our framework consists of: (1) an annotation infrastructure that seamlessly captures human computer-use demonstrations; (2) AGENTNET, the first large-scale computer-use task dataset spanning 3 operating systems and 200+ applications and websites; (3) a scalable pipeline that transforms demonstrations into state-action pairs with reflective long Chain-of-Thought reasoning that sustain robust performance gains as data scales.
Part-Aware Bottom-Up Group Reasoning for Fine-Grained Social Interaction Detection
Social interactions often emerge from subtle, fine-grained cues such as facial expressions, gaze, and gestures. However, existing methods for social interaction detection overlook such nuanced cues and primarily rely on holistic representations of individuals. Moreover, they directly detect social groups without explicitly modeling the underlying interactions between individuals. These drawbacks limit their ability to capture localized social signals and introduce ambiguity when group configurations should be inferred from social interactions grounded in nuanced cues. In this work, we propose a part-aware bottom-up group reasoning framework for fine-grained social interaction detection. The proposed method infers social groups and their interactions using body part features and their interpersonal relations. Our model first detects individuals and enhances their features using part-aware cues, and then infers group configuration by associating individuals via similarity-based reasoning, which considers not only spatial relations but also subtle social cues that signal interactions, leading to more accurate group inference. Experiments on the NVI dataset demonstrate that our method outperforms prior methods, achieving the new state of the art, while additional results on the Cafรฉ dataset further validate its generalizability to group activity understanding.
nvBench 2.0: Resolving Ambiguity in Text-to-Visualization through Stepwise Reasoning
Text-to-Visualization (Text2VIS) enables users to create visualizations from natural language queries, making data insights more accessible. However, Text2VIS faces challenges in interpreting ambiguous queries, as users often express their visualization needs in imprecise language. To address this challenge, we introduce nvBench 2.0, a new benchmark designed to evaluate Text2VIS systems in scenarios involving ambiguous queries.
Semi-off-Policy Reinforcement Learning for Vision-Language Slow-Thinking Reasoning
Enhancing large vision-language models (LVLMs) with visual slow-thinking reasoning is crucial for solving complex multimodal tasks. However, since LVLMs are mainly trained with vision-language alignment, it is difficult to adopt on-policy reinforcement learning (RL) to develop the slow thinking ability because the rollout space is restricted by its initial abilities. Off-policy RL offers a way to go beyond the current policy, but directly distilling trajectories from external models may cause visual hallucinations due to mismatched visual perception abilities across models. To address these issues, this paper proposes SOPHIA, a simple and scalable SemiOff-Policy RL for vision-language slow-tHInking reAsoning. SOPHIA builds a semi-off-policy behavior model by combining on-policy visual understanding from a trainable LVLM with off-policy slow-thinking reasoning from a language model, assigns outcome-based rewards to reasoning, and propagates visual rewards backward. Then LVLM learns slow-thinking reasoning ability from the obtained reasoning trajectories using propagated rewards via off-policy RL algorithms.
SSR: Enhancing Depth Perception in Vision-Language Models via Rationale-Guided Spatial Reasoning
Existing methods for integrating spatial cues, such as point clouds or depth, either require specialized sensors or fail to effectively exploit depth information for higher-order reasoning. To this end, we propose a novel Spatial Sense and Reasoning method, dubbed SSR, a novel framework that transforms raw depth data into structured, interpretable textual rationales. These textual rationales serve as meaningful intermediate representations to significantly enhance spatial reasoning capabilities. Additionally, we leverage knowledge distillation to compress the generated rationales into compact latent embeddings, which facilitate resourceefficient and plug-and-play integration into existing VLMs without retraining. To enable comprehensive evaluation, we introduce a new dataset named SSR-COT, a million-scale visual-language reasoning dataset enriched with intermediate spatial reasoning annotations, and present SSRBENCH, a comprehensive multi-task benchmark. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate SSR substantially improves depth utilization and enhances spatial reasoning, thereby advancing VLMs toward more human-like multi-modal understanding.
Dyn-O: Building Structured World Models with Object-Centric Representations
World models aim to capture the dynamics of the environment, enabling agents to predict and plan for future states. In most scenarios of interest, the dynamics are highly centered on interactions among objects within the environment. This motivates the development of world models that operate on object-centric rather than monolithic representations, with the goal of more effectively capturing environment dynamics and enhancing compositional generalization. However, the development of object-centric world models has largely been explored in environments with limited visual complexity (such as basic geometries). It remains underexplored whether such models can be effective in more challenging settings. In this paper, we fill this gap by introducing Dyn-O, an enhanced structured world model built upon object-centric representations. Compared to prior work in object-centric representations, Dyn-O improves in both learning representations and modeling dynamics. On the challenging Procgen games, we demonstrate that our method can learn objectcentric world models directly from pixel observations, outperforming DreamerV3 in rollout prediction accuracy. Furthermore, by decoupling object-centric features into dynamic-agnostic and dynamic-aware components, we enable finer-grained manipulation of these features and generate more diverse imagined trajectories.
CODECRASH: Exposing LLMFragility to Misleading Natural Language in Code Reasoning
Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently demonstrated strong capabilities in code-related tasks, but their robustness in code reasoning under perturbations remains underexplored. We introduce CODECRASH, a stress-testing framework with 1,279 questions from CRUXEVAL and LIVECODEBENCH, designed to evaluate reasoning reliability under structural perturbations and misleading natural language (NL) contexts. Through a systematic evaluation of 17 LLMs, we find that models often shortcut reasoning by over-relying on NL cues, leading to an average performance degradation of 23.2% in output prediction tasks. Even with Chain-of-Thought reasoning, models on average still have a 13.8%drop due to distractibility and rationalization, revealing a lack of critical reasoning capability to distinguish the actual code behaviors. While Large Reasoning Models with internal reasoning mechanisms improve robustness by fostering critical thinking, plausible yet incorrect hints can trigger pathological self-reflection, causing 2 3 times token consumption and even catastrophic cognitive dissonance in extreme cases for QwQ-32B. We refer to this phenomenon as Reasoning Collapse. CODECRASH provides a rigorous benchmark for evaluating robustness in code reasoning, guiding future research and development toward more reliable and resilient models.