Xuanyan Chen

Author directory

2026

Adaptive multimodal reasoning has emerged as a promising frontier in Vision-Language Models (VLMs), aiming to dynamically modulate between tool-augmented visual reasoning and text reasoning to enhance both effectiveness and efficiency. However, existing evaluations rely on static difficulty labels and simple metrics, overlooking the model-dependent nature of task difficulties: a task that is challenging for one model may be trivial for another. Consequently, they obscure the distinction between reasoning mode selection and overall task accuracy while neglecting fine-grained reasoning process analyses. In this paper, we propose AdaptMMBench, a comprehensive benchmark for adaptive multimodal reasoning across five domains: natural scene, OCR, GUI, knowledge, and math, encompassing both direct perception and complex reasoning tasks. AdaptMMBench utilizes a Matthews Correlation Coefficient (MCC) metric to evaluate the quality of reasoning mode selection, isolating this meta-cognition ability by dynamically identifying task difficulties based on models’ capability boundaries. Moreover, AdaptMMBench facilitates multi-dimensional reasoning process evaluation across key step coverage, tool effectiveness, and computational efficiency. Our evaluation shows that strong reasoning mode selection is helpful, but final adaptive gains and efficiency also depend on overall model capability. Process metrics further diagnose bottlenecks in reasoning coherence, tool use, and cost for improving adaptive performance and efficiency.
Self-reflection has become a key mechanism for improving reasoning in Vision-Language Models (VLMs), yet this corrective mechanism often fails when resolving complex fine-grained visual ambiguities. This performance degradation stems from the issue of modality disconnect in self-reflection: most existing models execute self-reflection either within textual or latent space, lacking an explicit mechanism to align textual reasoning with visual evidence. In this paper, we propose MIRROR, a closed-loop visual reflection framework comprising four steps: response generation, error identification, region-based visual verification, and revision. In this cycle, the model first generates an initial response, identifies uncertain logical statements in the response that require visual verification, then grounds them in relevant image regions, and finally revises based on the visual evidence. We construct a multi-turn visual reflection dataset ReflectV, which empowers the model with such a reflective capability. Extensive experiments across diverse multimodal benchmarks show that MIRROR improves performance and reduces visual hallucinations by an average of about 7.2%, demonstrating the advantage of transforming self-reflection from open-loop textual revision into closed-loop, visually grounded verification.