Optical Reasoning: Rethinking Images as an Expressive Reasoning Medium Beyond Text
Chain-of-Thought (CoT) improves the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) and has been extended to Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). More recent work further moves from text-based multimodal reasoning toward interleaved-modal reasoning, where intermediate steps can incorporate both textual rationales and visual evidence. In this work, we propose a bolder and more ambitious idea: could images alone serve as the reasoning medium for both language and multimodal tasks? To explore this, we propose optical reasoning, which treats images as a standalone reasoning medium. We instantiate this concept with two variants: typographic-based optical reasoning, which optimizes visual layo...
| Authors | Yutong Bian, Dongjie Cheng, Heming Xia et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 8 June 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 8 June 2026 |
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