Think, Look, and Revise: Inconsistency-Aware Visual Self-Correction in MLLMs

Yu Cheng, Arushi Goel, Hakan Bilen


Abstract
Tool-augmented multimodal reasoning integrates external tools (e.g., object detection, depth estimation) into multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to address perceptual bottlenecks in complex visual tasks. However, existing approaches rarely verify tool outputs, limiting their ability to detect and recover from tool failures. We propose ReVISE, a framework that equips MLLMs with verification and dynamic error recovery for tool-augmented reasoning. ReVISE introduces (1) a curated training dataset that supervises reflective behaviors, enabling models to validate tool-derived evidence, reformulate queries when visual mismatches arise, and fall back to intrinsic grounding when external tools are unreliable; and (2) a reinforcement learning based targeted rewards that encourage internal reflection and penalize spatial misalignment. Experiments on several benchmarks demonstrate consistent improvements over existing methods, highlighting the importance of error detection and correction in tool-augmented multimodal reasoning.
Anthology ID:
2026.emnlp-main.106
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
October
Year:
2026
Address:
Budapest, Hungary
Editors:
Hung-Yi Lee, Sunipa Dev, Jessy Li, Desmond Elliott
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2495–2516
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.106/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yu Cheng, Arushi Goel, and Hakan Bilen. 2026. Think, Look, and Revise: Inconsistency-Aware Visual Self-Correction in MLLMs. In Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 2495–2516, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Think, Look, and Revise: Inconsistency-Aware Visual Self-Correction in MLLMs (Cheng et al., EMNLP 2026)
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https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.106.pdf