Youjun Chen
Author directory2026
Func-R1: Incentivizing Mathematical Function Reasoning in Multimodal Large Language Models
Mingze Yin | Xiaohan Wang | Dian Li | Yao Haichao | Yilin Zhao | Youjun Chen | Sinbadliu | Jintai Chen | Yiheng Zhu | Chang-Yu Hsieh | Aimin Pan
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Mingze Yin | Xiaohan Wang | Dian Li | Yao Haichao | Yilin Zhao | Youjun Chen | Sinbadliu | Jintai Chen | Yiheng Zhu | Chang-Yu Hsieh | Aimin Pan
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Performing deliberate mathematical reasoning in visual contexts is a hallmark of expert-level Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) and requires a sophisticated synthesis of perceptual grounding and symbolic logic. However, in the realm of mathematical functions, our investigation reveals a critical *modality interference phenomenon*: even advanced models, while performing textual computational reasoning, tend to disregard or misinterpret essential visual cues. To address this challenge, we propose **Func-R1**, which synergistically harmonizes precise visual perception and rigorous logical reasoning. Concretely, built upon an explicitly decoupled architecture, we employ a hierarchical post-training framework to progressively identify critical visual evidence and conduct in-depth theoretical reasoning. Furthermore, the *Perception-Aligned Theoretic Optimization (PATO)* strategy is proposed to steer policy updating towards internalizing fundamental theoretical properties while dynamically rectifying heterogeneous visual information throughout the reasoning process. Extensive experiments across diverse benchmarks demonstrate that Func-R1 delivers the optimal performance among open-source MLLMs, even surpassing GPT-5 with an 8.4% improvement on MathVerse’s function-oriented tasks.