Monet: Reasoning in Latent Visual Space Beyond Images and Language
"Thinking with images" has emerged as an effective paradigm for advancing visual reasoning, extending beyond text-only chains of thought by injecting visual evidence into intermediate reasoning steps. However, existing methods fall short of human-like abstract visual thinking, as their flexibility is fundamentally limited by external tools. In this work, we introduce Monet, a training framework that enables multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to reason directly within the latent visual space by generating continuous embeddings that function as intermediate visual thoughts. We identify two core challenges in training MLLMs for latent visual reasoning: high computational cost in latent-vision alignment and insufficient supervision over latent embeddings, and address them with a three-stage distillation-based supervised fine-tuning (SFT) pipeline. We further reveal a limitation of applying GRPO to latent reasoning: it primarily enhances text-based reasoning rather than latent reasoning. To overcome this, we propose VLPO (Visual-latent Policy Optimization), a reinforcement learning method that explicitly incorporates latent embeddings into policy gradient updates. To support SFT, we construct Monet-SFT-125K, a high-quality text-image interleaved CoT dataset containing 125K real-world, chart, OCR, and geometry CoTs. Our model, Monet-7B, shows consistent gains across real-world perception and reasoning benchmarks and exhibits strong out-of-distribution generalization on challenging abstract visual reasoning tasks. We also empirically analyze the role of each training component and discuss our early unsuccessful attempts, providing insights for future developments in visual latent reasoning. Our model, data, and code are available at https://github.com/NOVAglow646/Monet.
6927bed6243b2216fb75cd58
Qixun Wang
6927bed6243b2216fb75cd59
Yang Shi
claimed_verified
2025-11-27T09:59:04.104Z
673c7319d11b1c2e246ead9c
https://cdn-avatars.huggingface.co/v1/production/uploads/673c7319d11b1c2e246ead9c/IjFIO--N7Hm_BOEafhEQv.jpeg
Yang Shi
DogNeverSleep
user
DogNeverSleep
6927bed6243b2216fb75cd5a
Yifei Wang
6927bed6243b2216fb75cd5b
Yuanxing Zhang
6927bed6243b2216fb75cd5c
Pengfei Wan
6927bed6243b2216fb75cd5d
Kun Gai
6927bed6243b2216fb75cd5e
Xianghua Ying
6927bed6243b2216fb75cd5f
Yisen Wang
Monet: Reasoning in Latent Visual Space Beyond Images and Language
"Thinking with images" has emerged as an effective paradigm for advancing visual reasoning, extending beyond text-only chains of thought by injecting visual evidence into intermediate reasoning steps. However, existing methods fall short of human-like abstract visual thinking, as their flexibility is fundamentally limited by external tools. In this work, we introduce Monet, a training framework that enables multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to reason directly within the latent visual space by generating continuous embeddings that function as intermediate visual thoughts. We identify two core challenges in training MLLMs for latent visual reasoning: high computational cost in latent-vision alignment and insufficient supervision over latent embeddings, and address them with a three-stage distillation-based supervised fine-tuning (SFT) pipeline. We further reveal a limitation of applying GRPO to latent reasoning: it primarily enhances text-based reasoning rather than latent reasoning. To overcome this, we propose VLPO (Visual-latent Policy Optimization), a reinforcement learning method that explicitly incorporates latent embeddings into policy gradient updates. To support SFT, we construct Monet-SFT-125K, a high-quality text-image interleaved CoT dataset containing 125K real-world, chart, OCR, and geometry CoTs. Our model, Monet-7B, shows consistent gains across real-world perception and reasoning benchmarks and exhibits strong out-of-distribution generalization on challenging abstract visual reasoning tasks. We also empirically analyze the role of each training component and discuss our early unsuccessful attempts, providing insights for future developments in visual latent reasoning. Our model, data, and code are available at https://github.com/NOVAglow646/Monet.
Monet, a training framework, enables MLLMs to reason in latent visual space using continuous embeddings, addressing challenges like computational cost and supervision, and outperforms on visual reasoning tasks.
multimodal large language models MLLMs latent visual space continuous embeddings intermediate visual thoughts three-stage distillation-based supervised fine-tuning SFT GRPO Visual-latent Policy Optimization VLPO reinforcement learning policy gradient updates CoT dataset real-world perception reasoning benchmarks out-of-distribution generalization