Arxiv paper - Machine Mental Imagery: Empower Multimodal Reasoning with Latent Visual Tokens

In this episode, we discuss Machine Mental Imagery: Empower Multimodal Reasoning with Latent Visual Tokens by Zeyuan Yang, Xueyang Yu, Delin Chen, Maohao Shen, Chuang Gan. The paper proposes Mirage, a framework that enables vision-language models to perform internal visual reasoning by generating latent visual tokens alongside text, without producing explicit images. Mirage is trained through a combination of distillation from image embeddings, text-only supervision, and reinforcement learning to align visual reasoning with task goals. Experiments show that this approach improves multimodal reasoning performance on various benchmarks without the need for heavy image generation.