On-policy distillation (OPD) improves reasoning by training a student on trajectories sampled from its own policy under supervision from a teacher. In multimodal reasoning, a common extension is to use a privileged teacher that observes training-time-only signals such as reference answers or rationales. However, such answer-side privilege creates a train-test mismatch: the teacher’s supervision may depend on signals unavailable to the student, encouraging shortcut imitation rather than visually grounded reasoning. We propose ViCuR, a visually grounded privileged-teacher distillation framework that replaces answer-side privilege with visual cues (query-related evidence in the input). Because these cues are derived from the same visual input available at inference, their evidence is recoverable by the student. To support this, ViCuR introduces a lightweight cue recovery module that uses dedicated sink-token cross-attention during prefill to aggregate task-relevant visual evidence into an internal representation, without changing the inference interface or requiring auxiliary cue-generation losses. Across seven benchmarks with Qwen3-VL-2B and 8B students, ViCuR consistently improves over answer-based on-policy self-distillation by +1.19 and +1.24 on overall average performance. It also extends naturally to stronger-teacher OPD, surpassing OPD baselines by +0.64 and +1.08, with consistent out-of-domain gains at the 8B scale. These results show that, in multimodal on-policy distillation, the design of teacher privilege is as important as teacher strength.

Recent latent visual reasoning methods achieve substantial gains by inserting continuous latent tokens into multimodal language models. These gains are commonly attributed to the tokens encoding visual evidence; recent analyses, however, reveal a paradox: the tokens are loosely tied to the image and contribute little to the answer. Critically, these analyses treat latent tokens as a single unit, obscuring the source of the gains. We therefore decompose latent tokens into three testable components: latent slots, boundary markers, and format, and develop a state-of-the-art method as a probe under favorable conditions. Across six method-stage settings and four perception-heavy benchmarks, latent slots fail every prediction of the visual-memory account. Strikingly, retaining only the boundary markers preserves 78 to 100% of the gain in several settings, while the model attends to the image more narrowly at latent positions than at answer positions. These results do not support slot contents as recoverable visual memory; much of the benefit is instead associated with marker and format control, together with visual-attention routing. At matched accuracy, methods can still rely on markedly different mechanisms shaped by training supervision. Latent visual reasoning thus needs evaluation not only by accuracy but by what the model actually relies on.

Understanding long videos remains challenging due to the sparsity of visual evidence relevant to a given query. Prior work has explored program-based visual grounding, typically relying on executable programs generated by auxiliary large language models. However, when scaling to long videos, existing approaches face several critical limitations: (1) frame-centric vision modules are often insufficient for long video processing; (2) naively applying program-based reasoning to all queries incurs considerable computational overhead; and (3) errors arising from low-confidence predictions and imperfect program execution are difficult to recover from. To address these challenges, we propose VideoPro, a unified framework that enables VideoLLMs to adaptively reason over long videos and refine their predictions through executable programs. VideoPro first performs adaptive reasoning, dynamically determining whether a query can be resolved directly by the native VideoLLM or requires explicit multi-step program reasoning. For complex queries, the model decomposes the task into executable programs that invoke specialized vision modules for precise temporal and semantic grounding. To further improve robustness, VideoPro incorporates a self-refinement mechanism that leverages execution feedback and confidence signals to correct erroneous executions and refine low-confidence reasoning programs. By tightly integrating adaptive reasoning with self-refinement, VideoPro consistently outperforms prior methods across multiple long-video understanding benchmarks, yielding an average 6.7% improvement for Qwen3-VL-8B.

Interleaved reasoning paradigms enhance Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) with visual feedback but are hindered by the prohibitive computational cost of re-encoding pixel-dense images. A promising alternative, latent visual reasoning, circumvents this bottleneck yet faces limitations: methods either fail to capture intermediate state evolution due to single-step, non-interleaved structures, or sacrifice precise perceptual modeling by over-compressing features. We introduce Interleaved Latent Visual Reasoning (ILVR), a framework that unifies dynamic state evolution with precise perceptual modeling. ILVR interleaves textual generation with latent visual representations that act as specific, evolving cues for subsequent reasoning. Specifically, we employ a self-supervision strategy where a momentum teacher model selectively distills relevant features from ground-truth intermediate images into sparse supervision targets. This adaptive selection mechanism guides the model to autonomously generate context-aware visual signals. Extensive experiments on multimodal reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that ILVR outperforms existing approaches, effectively bridging the gap between fine-grained perception and sequential multimodal reasoning.