Chao Xue

Wentao Tan, Qiong Cao, Yibing Zhan et al.

Achieving human-like reasoning capabilities in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) has long been a goal. Current methods primarily focus on synthesizing positive rationales, typically relying on manual annotations or complex systems. Moreover, they often overlook negative reasoning, which limits the model's generalization ability and robustness in multimodal inference. To address this gap, we propose a novel framework: \textbf{S}elf-Aligning \textbf{M}ultimodal Reasoning with \textbf{A}nswer-O\textbf{r}iented Chain-of-\textbf{T}hought (SMART). SMART employs an answer-oriented chain-of-thought (AoT) prompt to automatically construct high-quality data. Drawing inspiration from human proof-based strategies, AoT leverages both correct and incorrect answers to extract key visual information that links questions and answers. When provided with correct answers, the model produces strong positive rationales. Conversely, when correct answers are replaced with incorrect alternatives, the model generates an erroneous yet compelling reasoning path, serving as a form of discriminative negative rationale. Models trained with AoT-generated data outperform those trained on manually annotated datasets, demonstrating superior reasoning capabilities. Consequently, SMART establishes an iterative generation-optimization method that continually enhances the model's reasoning skills. Experiments indicate that the SMART framework significantly improves various MLLMs, regardless of model architecture, parameter size, or pre-training dataset. The code is available at https://github.com/WentaoTan/SMART.

Canhui Wu, Qiong Cao, Chao Xue et al.

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have leveraged explicit Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting to improve reasoning accuracy. However, most existing methods primarily compress verbose reasoning outputs. These Long-to-Short transformations aim to improve efficiency, but still rely on explicit reasoning during inference. In this work, we introduce \textbf{3TF} (\textbf{T}hought-\textbf{T}raining and \textbf{T}hought-\textbf{F}ree inference), a framework for efficient reasoning that takes a Short-to-Long perspective. We first train a hybrid model that can operate in both reasoning and non-reasoning modes, and then further train it on CoT-annotated data to internalize structured reasoning, while enforcing concise, thought-free outputs at inference time using the no-reasoning mode. Unlike compression-based approaches, 3TF improves the reasoning quality of non-reasoning outputs, enabling models to perform rich internal reasoning implicitly while keeping external outputs short. Empirically, 3TF-trained models obtain large improvements on reasoning benchmarks under thought-free inference, demonstrating that high quality reasoning can be learned and executed implicitly without explicit step-by-step generation.