Problem Solving
ChainMPQ: Interleaved Text-Image Reasoning Chains for Mitigating Relation Hallucinations
Wu, Yike, Wang, Yiwei, Cai, Yujun
While Large Vision-Language Models (L VLMs) achieve strong performance in multimodal tasks, hallucinations continue to hinder their reliability. Among the three categories of hallucinations, which include object, attribute, and relation, relation hallucinations account for the largest proportion but have received the least attention. To address this issue, we propose ChainMPQ (Multi-Perspective Questions guided Interleaved Chain of Image and Text), a training-free method that improves relational inference in L VLMs by utilizing accumulated textual and visual memories. ChainMPQ first extracts subject and object keywords from the question to enhance the corresponding image regions. It then constructs multi-perspective questions that focus on the three core components of a relationship: the subject, the object, and the relation that links them. These questions are sequentially input to the model, with textual and visual memories from earlier steps providing supporting context for subsequent ones, thereby forming an interleaved chain of images and text that guides progressive relational reasoning. Experiments on multiple L VLMs and benchmarks show that ChainMPQ substantially reduces relation hallucinations, while ablation studies further validate the effectiveness of its three core modules.
Bridging Reasoning to Learning: Unmasking Illusions using Complexity Out of Distribution Generalization
Paqaleh, Mohammad Mahdi Samiei, Marioriyad, Arash, Tahmasebi-Zadeh, Arman, Fereydooni, Mohamadreza, Ghaznavai, Mahdi, Baghshah, Mahdieh Soleymani
Recent progress has pushed AI frontiers from pattern recognition tasks toward problems that require step by step, System2 style reasoning, especially with large language models. Yet, unlike learning, where generalization and out of distribution (OoD) evaluation concepts are well formalized, there is no clear, consistent definition or metric for reasoning ability. We propose Complexity Out of Distribution (Complexity OoD) generalization as a framework and problem setting to define and measure reasoning. A model exhibits Complexity OoD generalization when it maintains performance on test instances whose minimal required solution complexity, either representational (richer solution structure) or computational (more reasoning steps/program length), exceeds that of all training examples. We formalize complexity via solution description Kolmogorov complexity and operational proxies (e.g., object/relation counts; reasoning step counts), clarifying how Complexity OoD differs from length and compositional OoD. This lens unifies learning and reasoning: many cases solvable with System1 like processing at low complexity become System2 like under complexity pressure, while System2 can be viewed as generalization over solution structures. We translate this perspective into practice with recommendations for operationalizing Complexity OoD across the stack: incorporating complexity into benchmark and evaluation metric design, rethinking supervision to target solution traces, seeking and designing inductive biases for Complexity OoD generalization, addressing learning to reason spillovers such as spurious shortcuts, semantic robustness, catastrophic forgetting, and step wise calibration. Because Complexity OoD cannot be solved by scaling data alone, progress toward robust reasoning will require architectures and training regimes that explicitly model and allocate computation with respect to complexity.
Toward Causal-Visual Programming: Enhancing Agentic Reasoning in Low-Code Environments
Xu, Jiexi, Liu, Jiaqi, Wang, Lanruo, Liu, Su
Large language model (LLM) agents are increasingly capable of orchestrating complex tasks in low-code environments. However, these agents often exhibit hallucinations and logical inconsistencies because their inherent reasoning mechanisms rely on probabilistic associations rather than genuine causal understanding. This paper introduces a new programming paradigm: Causal-Visual Programming (CVP), designed to address this fundamental issue by explicitly introducing causal structures into the workflow design. CVP allows users to define a simple "world model" for workflow modules through an intuitive low-code interface, effectively creating a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) that explicitly defines the causal relationships between modules. This causal graph acts as a crucial constraint during the agent's reasoning process, anchoring its decisions to a user-defined causal structure and significantly reducing logical errors and hallucinations by preventing reliance on spurious correlations. To validate the effectiveness of CVP, we designed a synthetic experiment that simulates a common real-world problem: a distribution shift between the training and test environments. Our results show that a causally anchored model maintained stable accuracy in the face of this shift, whereas a purely associative baseline model that relied on probabilistic correlations experienced a significant performance drop. The primary contributions of this study are: a formal definition of causal structures for workflow modules; the proposal and implementation of a CVP framework that anchors agent reasoning to a user-defined causal graph; and empirical evidence demonstrating the framework's effectiveness in enhancing agent robustness and reducing errors caused by causal confusion in dynamic environments. CVP offers a viable path toward building more interpretable, reliable, and trustworthy AI agents.
KnowRL: Exploring Knowledgeable Reinforcement Learning for Factuality
Ren, Baochang, Qiao, Shuofei, Zheng, Da, Chen, Huajun, Zhang, Ningyu
Large Language Models (LLMs), particularly slow-thinking models, often exhibit severe hallucination, outputting incorrect content due to an inability to accurately recognize knowledge boundaries during reasoning. While Reinforcement Learning (RL) can enhance complex reasoning abilities, its outcome-oriented reward mechanism often lacks factual supervision over the thinking process, further exacerbating the hallucination problem. To address the high hallucination in slow-thinking models, we propose Knowledge-enhanced RL, KnowRL. KnowRL guides models to perform fact-based slow thinking by integrating a factuality reward, based on knowledge verification, into the RL training process, helping them recognize their knowledge boundaries. KnowRL guides models to perform fact-based slow thinking by integrating a factuality reward, based on knowledge verification, into the RL training process, helping them recognize their knowledge boundaries. This targeted factual input during RL training enables the model to learn and internalize fact-based reasoning strategies. By directly rewarding adherence to facts within the reasoning steps, KnowRL fosters a more reliable thinking process. Experimental results on three hallucination evaluation datasets and two reasoning evaluation datasets demonstrate that KnowRL effectively mitigates hallucinations in slow-thinking models while maintaining their original strong reasoning capabilities. Our code is available at https://github.com/zjunlp/KnowRL.
InfiMed: Low-Resource Medical MLLMs with Advancing Understanding and Reasoning
Liu, Zeyu, Hou, Zhitian, Zhu, Guanghao, Sang, Zhijie, Xie, Congkai, Yang, Hongxia
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable progress in domains such as visual understanding and mathematical reasoning. However, their application in the medical domain is constrained by two key challenges: (1) multimodal medical datasets are scarce and often contain sparse information, limiting reasoning depth; and (2) Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR), though effective in general domains, cannot reliably improve model performance in the medical domain. To overcome these challenges, during the supervised fine-tuning (SFT) stage, we incorporate high-quality textual reasoning data and general multimodal data alongside multimodal medical data to efficiently enhance foundational medical capabilities and restore the base model's reasoning ability. Moreover, considering that there are some multimodal medical datasets with sparse information, we further synthesize reflective-pattern-injected chain-of-thought (CoT) in addition to general CoT samples, equipping the model with initial reflective reasoning capabilities that provide a structured foundation for subsequent RLVR training. Finally, we introduce our InfiMed-Series models, InfiMed-SFT-3B and InfiMed-RL-3B, both of which deliver state-of-the-art performance across seven multimodal medical benchmarks. Notably, InfiMed-RL-3B achieves an average accuracy of 59.2%, outperforming even larger models like InternVL3-8B, which achieves 57.3%. Specifically, during the SFT phase, we utilized 188K samples, while the RLVR phase incorporated 36K samples, demonstrating the efficacy of both training strategies in achieving superior performance. We also conducted a series of extensive experiments, which provide valuable insights that contribute to advancing the performance of MLLMs in medical scenarios.
Controlled Agentic Planning & Reasoning for Mechanism Synthesis
Gandarela, Joรฃo Pedro, Rios, Thiago, Menzel, Stefan, Freitas, Andrรฉ
This work presents a dual-agent \ac{llm}-based reasoning framework for automated planar mechanism synthesis that tightly couples linguistic specification with symbolic representation and simulation. From a natural-language task description, the system composes symbolic constraints and equations, generates and parametrises simulation code, and iteratively refines designs via critic-driven feedback, including symbolic regression and geometric distance metrics, closing an actionable linguistic/symbolic optimisation loop. To evaluate the approach, we introduce MSynth, a benchmark of analytically defined planar trajectories. Empirically, critic feedback and iterative refinement yield large improvements (up to 90\% on individual tasks) and statistically significant gains per the Wilcoxon signed-rank test. Symbolic-regression prompts provide deeper mechanistic insight primarily when paired with larger models or architectures with appropriate inductive biases (e.g., LRM).
HopWeaver: Cross-Document Synthesis of High-Quality and Authentic Multi-Hop Questions
Shen, Zhiyu, Liu, Jiyuan, Pang, Yunhe, Rao, Yanghui
Multi-Hop Question Answering (MHQA) is crucial for evaluating the model's capability to integrate information from diverse sources. However, creating extensive and high-quality MHQA datasets is challenging: (i) manual annotation is expensive, and (ii) current synthesis methods often produce simplistic questions or require extensive manual guidance. This paper introduces HopWeaver, the first cross-document framework synthesizing authentic multi-hop questions without human intervention. HopWeaver synthesizes bridge and comparison questions through an innovative pipeline that identifies complementary documents and constructs authentic reasoning paths to ensure true multi-hop reasoning. We further present a comprehensive system for evaluating the synthesized multi-hop questions. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that the synthesized questions achieve comparable or superior quality to human-annotated datasets at a lower cost. Our framework provides a valuable tool for the research community: it can automatically generate challenging benchmarks from any raw corpus, which opens new avenues for both evaluation and targeted training to improve the reasoning capabilities of advanced QA models, especially in domains with scarce resources.