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arXiv · 2505.18842

v1: Learning to Point Visual Tokens for Multimodal Grounded Reasoning

Jiwan Chung·Junhyeok Kim·Siyeol Kim·Jaeyoung Lee·Min Soo Kim·Youngjae Yu
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Abstract

When thinking with images, humans rarely rely on a single glance: they revisit visual evidence while reasoning. In contrast, most Multimodal Language Models encode an image once to key-value cache and then reason purely in text, making it hard to re-ground intermediate steps. We empirically confirm this: as reasoning chains lengthen, models progressively lose focus on relevant regions. We introduce v1, a lightweight extension for active visual referencing via point-and-copy: the model selects relevant image patches and copies their embeddings back into the reasoning stream. Crucially, our point-and-copy mechanism retrieves patches using their semantic representations as keys, ensuring perceptual evidence remains aligned with the reasoning space. To train this behavior, we build v1g, a dataset of 300K multimodal reasoning traces with interleaved grounding annotations. Across multimodal mathematical reasoning benchmarks, v1 consistently outperforms comparable baselines. We release our code, model, and data.

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Jiwan Chung, Junhyeok Kim, Siyeol Kim, Jaeyoung Lee, Min Soo Kim, Youngjae Yu. 2026-08-05. v1: Learning to Point Visual Tokens for Multimodal Grounded Reasoning. https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.18842

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