A neuro-symbolic approach that integrates formal constraint reasoning into the VLM solving process via a Maximum Satisfiability (MaxSAT) oracle and improves logical consistency and increases the number of solved instances, particularly in full-board refinement mode is proposed.
Abstract
Vision--Language Models (VLMs) have recently demonstrated promising performance on structured visual reasoning tasks, including grid-based puzzles. However, despite strong perceptual capabilities, these models lack explicit mechanisms for enforcing logical consistency and frequently generate assignments that violate underlying constraints. In this paper, we propose a neuro-symbolic approach that integrates formal constraint reasoning into the VLM solving process via a Maximum Satisfiability (MaxSAT) oracle. Rather than computing solutions directly, the symbolic component acts as a consistency validator and refinement engine. Candidate placements generated by the VLM are encoded as soft clauses in a partial MaxSAT formulation, while Sudoku constraints remain hard clauses. When inconsistencies arise, the MaxSAT solver identifies a largest mutually consistent subset of assignments, which is then translated into structured textual and visual feedback to guide subsequent refinements. We evaluate our approach on a Sudoku dataset across multiple open-source and closed-access VLMs. Results show that MaxSAT-based feedback improves logical consistency and increases the number of solved instances, particularly in full-board refinement mode. These findings demonstrate that symbolic optimisation can enhance the reliability of vision-language reasoning.
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 achieved remarkable progress in aligning visual and textual information; however, their inference processes remain largely implicit, end-to-end, and weakly structured. As a result, even state-of-the-art models often struggle with logical consistency, spatial reasoning, multi-entity binding, and robustness to occlusion or viewpoint changes, limiting their reliability in scientific, industrial, and safety-critical applications. To address these limitations, we propose Structure-Aware Visual Reasoning (SAVR), a conceptual framework that augments VLMs with explicit representation and constraint-based reasoning components. SAVR decomposes visual inference into three interpretable stages: (i) an entity–attribute–relation (EAR) representation, (ii) constraint-aware reasoning over structured representations, and (iii) integration of structured predictions with VLM-generated outputs. This formulation treats visual reasoning as an explicit process that enforces spatial, logical, and physical constraints over grounded entities, thereby improving consistency, transparency, and controllability. Furthermore, SAVR unifies several previously fragmented research directions-including scene graphs, object-centric learning, neuro-symbolic reasoning, and spatially grounded VLMs-into a coherent architectural perspective. Through this synthesis, we clarify how explicit structural representations can systematically mitigate common failure modes of end-to-end VLMs. While this work is conceptual and does not include empirical evaluation, it provides rigorous problem formulation, design rationale, and comparative analysis that establish a foundation for future structure-aware multimodal reasoning systems.
While Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) exhibit strong perceptual capabilities, they remain vulnerable in visual reasoning tasks. Existing benchmarks largely focus on symbolic mathematical or scientific problems and simple vision-centric tasks, offering limited assessment of complex visual reasoning and logical consistency, a critical requirement for reliable reasoning systems. We introduce ConVBench, a complex vision-centric reasoning benchmark in which each image is paired with two logically equivalent questions across six categories: action and state, complex counting, spatial reasoning, causal and intent understanding, commonsense reasoning, and temporal perception. To complement this benchmark, we define two evaluation metrics, logical consistency and robust accuracy, that jointly assess both the correctness and consistency of model responses. We further present ConVLM, which improves LVLM reasoning through Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO)-based reinforcement learning with a novel consistency reward. This method leverages automatically generated logically equivalent question-answer pairs and a dual-reward design combining accuracy- and consistency-based signals, encouraging agreement between paired responses. The framework functions effectively with or without strict answer supervision.
Liqiang Jing, Xiong Zhou, Siddharth Varia et al.· 1 citation· ⚡1
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.
Hard symbolic-reasoning tasks such as Sudoku, maze pathfinding, and ARC remain challenging for LLMs due to their fixed-depth autoregressive reasoning, which limits systematic search, refinement, and backtracking. While recursive models such as Hierarchical Reasoning Model (HRM) and Tiny Recursive Model (TRM) address this limitation through iterative latent-state refinement, they are typically task-specific and do not leverage pretrained language priors. We propose R-Qwen, a recursive reasoning framework built upon a pretrained Qwen backbone. R-Qwen repeatedly refines a candidate solution through programmatic self-recursion and deep supervision, combining the structured iterative computation of recursive models with the linguistic and reasoning priors of pretrained LLMs. We further adapt Hierarchical Supervision Weighting (HSW) to autoregressive models by exponentially weighting losses across recursive steps. HSW reduces gradient variance by at least 50\%, improves the signal-to-noise ratio of stochastic gradients, and accelerates convergence. Across eight challenging benchmarks, R-Qwen consistently outperforms prior recursive reasoning models and substantially larger LLMs while using a comparable number of trainable parameters. Notably, on ARC-AGI dataset, our model achieves a 27.6\% improvement over the baseline, highlighting the effectiveness of recursive refinement for general symbolic reasoning. These results suggest that recursive reasoning mechanisms and pretrained language model priors are complementary approaches for improving symbolic puzzle-solving. Code and models will be released after acceptance.
Omid Nejati Manzari, Guillaume Lajoie, H. Rivaz· 0 citations
Document question answering over scanned pages requires two coupled abilities: (i) canonicalizing complex layouts into a faithful textual structure, and (ii) selecting and reasoning over query-relevant evidence from that structure. Most existing pipelines decouple OCR from retrieval-augmented reasoning and optimize OCR for global reconstruction, which often misaligns with evidence needs and causes brittle grounding in multi-page settings. We propose UniDocVLM, an end-to-end framework that unifies OCR and visual RAG within a single vision-language model: the model first generates a structured parse of retrieved pages, then activates question-relevant evidence from the parse to support grounded reasoning and answering. To train UniDocVLM under heterogeneous supervision, we introduce a unified JR-GRPO reinforcement learning recipe with lightweight, verifiable rewards, including format, layout-aware OCR, evidence-consistency, and answer-correctness signals, and route them to the corresponding parts of the output to improve credit assignment and reduce interference. Experiments on multi-page document QA benchmarks show that UniDocVLM yields more reliable evidence grounding and improves downstream accuracy under complex layouts.
Zongsheng Cao, Anran Liu, Jun Xie et al.· Proceedings of the 32nd ACM...· 0 citations