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arXiv · 2512.11109

Limits and Gains of Test-Time Scaling in Vision-Language Reasoning

Mohammadjavad Ahmadpour·Amirmahdi Meighani·Payam Taebi·Omid Ghahroodi·Amirmohammad Izadi·Mahdieh Soleymani Baghshah
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Abstract

Test-time scaling (TTS) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for improving the reasoning ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) by allocating additional computation at inference, yet its application to multimodal systems such as Vision-Language Models (VLMs) remains underexplored. In this work, we present a systematic empirical study of inference time reasoning methods applied across both open-source and closed-source VLMs on different benchmarks. Our results reveal that while closed-source models consistently benefit from structured reasoning and iterative Self-Refinement, open-source VLMs show inconsistent behavior: external verification provides the most reliable gains, whereas iterative refinement often degrades performance. We further find that the effectiveness of TTS is dataset-dependent, yielding clear improvements on multi-step reasoning tasks but offering only limited gains on perception-focused benchmarks. These findings demonstrate that TTS is not a universal solution and must be tailored to both model capabilities and task characteristics, motivating future work on adaptive TTS strategies and multimodal reward models.

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Mohammadjavad Ahmadpour, Amirmahdi Meighani, Payam Taebi, Omid Ghahroodi, Amirmohammad Izadi, Mahdieh Soleymani Baghshah. 2025-12-11. Limits and Gains of Test-Time Scaling in Vision-Language Reasoning. https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.11109

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