This work introduces VBVR-Pro, a closed-loop testbed that makes native visual reasoning through generation trainable, verifiable, optimizable, and experimentally controllable, and identifies recurring failure modes of the prevalent VLM-as-a-judge paradigm.
Abstract
Native visual reasoning treats visual generation as the medium of reasoning itself: visual states (i.e. images and videos) are not merely inputs to be understood or outputs to be rendered, but first-class substrates for problem solving beyond language. Yet progress remains bottlenecked by the lack of scalable training tasks, reliable feedback, and controlled comparisons across generative substrates. In this work, we introduce VBVR-Pro, a closed-loop testbed that makes native visual reasoning through generation trainable, verifiable, optimizable, and experimentally controllable. 1) Task scaling. VBVR-Pro turns visual reasoning into a controlled task space of 300 procedurally generated tasks. Models trained on VBVR-Pro show strong transfer beyond the proposed suite across seven external visual reasoning benchmarks such as RISE-Video, MME-CoF-Pro, and BabyVision. 2) Verifiable rewards. VBVR-Pro provides verifiable reward scorers for task-grounded evaluation. Through a systematic study of leading MLLMs as judges, we identify recurring failure modes of the prevalent VLM-as-a-judge paradigm. In contrast, the proposed scorers are grounded in deterministic, task-specific rules, achieve fine-grained alignment with human judgments. Importantly, they serve as reliable reward signals for large-scale multi-task reinforcement learning and demonstrate stronger post-RL performance across visual reasoning tasks. 3) Mechanism study. VBVR-Pro enables controlled modality studies across more than 30 image, video, and interleaved generators. Our analysis shows that video generation remains strongest for tasks requiring persistent spatiotemporal state tracking, while interleaved generation provides a compute-efficient alternative. Critically, ablations and probing suggest the presence of vision-native trajectories that are crucial to visual reasoning. We release all data, models, scorers, and code.
Video generation has advanced to produce visually compelling and temporally coherent results. Yet, whether these models can genuinely think with video--executing symbolic rules, respecting physical laws, and pursuing intentional goals--remains an open question. Existing benchmarks only partially address this, often conflating visual quality with cognitive correctness. We introduce VWG-Bench (Video World Generalist Benchmark), a comprehensive benchmark spanning 9 reasoning dimensions and 38 fine-grained tasks. To enable precise diagnosis, we design a three-level VLM-as-Judge protocol that independently assesses video-level fluency, task-level rule adherence, and sample-level goal realization. Evaluations of leading models reveal a striking gap: while models achieve strong rendering scores, they consistently fail on logic-heavy and rule-constrained tasks. To address this, we propose Vid-PRE (Video Prompt Reasoner and Enhancer), a model-agnostic prompt rewriter that offloads the cognitive burden of reasoning to a dedicated VLM. Trained via reinforcement learning with purely text-based rewards, Vid-PRE produces concise, constraint-aware prompts without the instability of video-level reward signals. Experiments show that Vid-PRE yields substantial reasoning improvements across multiple generators without architectural modifications. Together, VWG-Bench and Vid-PRE offer a rigorous diagnostic lens and a scalable path toward true think-with-video capabilities. All data and code are publicly available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/KlingTeam/VWG-Bench.
Meng Luo, Yi-Chen Liu, Jia-Hao Wang et al.· 0 citations
Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has substantially improved language-model reasoning, yet its extension to vision-language models remains constrained by the lack of training data that are simultaneously broad, exactly verifiable, and reproducible. We introduce Trace, a taxonomy-guided environment for multidomain visual reasoning. Trace factorizes task construction into a scene grammar and an executable task program, separating visual realization from answer computation. A shared semantic state determines the rendered image, prompt, typed answer, verifier state, and replayable instance trace. The resulting environment comprises 1,000 tasks over 277 scene grammars and 11 visual domains, with controlled semantic and visual variation. RLVR on 64,000 Trace instances improves the macro-average across 24 external benchmarks by 3.51 percentage points for Qwen2.5-VL-3B and 4.06 points for Qwen2.5-VL-7B, providing evidence that broad procedural training can transfer beyond the generated task distributions. Project page: https://maveryn.github.io/trace/.
Vision-language models (VLMs) have made rapid progress in visual perception and increasingly support real-world tasks that depend on images. Many such tasks, however, require more than rec- ognizing what an image contains: a model must use visual evidence to make a complete decision whose parts jointly satisfy global constraints. We introduce COMPLEXITYWORLD, a benchmark of 390 tasks across 39 domain-inspired visual worlds and 29 decision categories. Each task is generated from a hidden structured specification, rendered as a visual scene, and scored by an exe- cutable verifier that accepts any feasible solution. Under direct inference, all evaluated models ex- cept GPT-5.6-Sol remain below 40% verifier ac- ceptance rate (VAR), while GPT-5.6-Sol reaches 75.6%. Performance improves substantially when the same decision information is made explicit in structured form, yet varies sharply across equiva- lent visual presentations. Agent scaffolds provide smaller, model-dependent gains. Together, these results reveal a persistent visual-to-decision bot- tleneck that additional inference alone does not remove.
Recent image generation systems increasingly combine multimodal understanding, reasoning, and synthesis, suggesting that they may do more than render plausible scenes. Yet existing evaluations emphasize aesthetics, prompt alignment, compositionality, or text-based answers, leaving unclear whether these systems can solve visual problems and faithfully express solutions in pixels. We introduce GenPuzzle, a benchmark for reasoning-centric image generation. GenPuzzle contains 2,005 problems across 12 tracks, spanning pattern completion, spatial construction, mazes, Sudoku, nonograms, tangrams, board games, matchstick puzzles, orthographic projection, and mathematical visual proof. Each task provides a visual puzzle and requires an image output that preserves the input state while executing a logically valid solution. GenPuzzle uses task-specific evaluation protocols: discrete grid outputs are transcribed and verified programmatically, while visually complex outputs are assessed with tiered, multidimensional, or binary multimodal large language model (MLLM) rubrics. We further select the automatic judge by measuring agreement with human reference scores. Across three frontier generators, the strongest model reaches only 40.57 Macro Overall, revealing frequent failures in logic, geometry, state preservation, and instruction execution. GenPuzzle provides a testbed for measuring progress from image rendering toward visual problem solving.
VGI-bench is introduced, containing 27 tasks and 810 instances, organized by a two-level taxonomy of task domains and skill tags for fine-grained evaluation of visual reasoning capabilities of video generation models, and it is hoped VGI-bench will help stimulate the development of next-generation video generation models.
Evaluating representative proprietary and open-source multimodal models, it is found that visual reasoning is strongly model- and environment-dependent, with no single setting consistently dominating across tasks.
Radiology AI is evolving beyond report generation. CARE-X explores a unified approach that combines flexible reasoning, calibrated predictions, and measurement-based tools for chest X-ray interpretation. The post Introducing CARE-X: Towards Clinically Useful Radiology VLMs with Auxiliary Supervision, Reward-Aligned Learning, and Tool-Augmented Measurement appeared first on Microsoft Research.
