Visual Scaffolding: Toward Native Multimodal Reasoning
The success of chain-of-thought (CoT) in complex reasoning can be attributed to a textual scaffolding effect: explicit intermediate results can be examined, reused, and composed to support subsequent reasoning, much as scaffolding supports a building under construction. However, mainstream multimodal LLMs lack an equivalent scaffold for visual distinctions that are difficult to express in concise verbal descriptions. We therefore ask: Can native visual representations become first-class citizens alongside language, providing a visual scaffold for reasoning? We define native multimodal reasoning as reasoning in which native visual representations and language jointly carry reusable interme...
| Authors | Run Shao, Zhaoyang Zhang, Ziyu Li et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CV |
| Published | 18 October 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 18 October 2026 |
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