Recent work has begun to equip vision-language-action (VLA) policies with explicit intermediate reasoning. In embodied control, however, textual chain-of-thought is a poor fit: irrelevant or weakly textual information can interfere with action prediction, while autoregressive text decoding adds too much latency for real-time closed-loop execution. We present VISUALTHINK-VLA, a visual intermediate-reasoning framework for accurate, low-latency VLA policies. We define visual intermediate reasoning operationally as constructing typed visual evidence, selecting a task-dependent budgeted route, and composing the selected channels into compact states before action decoding. Our bootstrapping philosophy is to guide action with effective visual thinking: VISUALTHINK-VLA bootstraps action prediction through a compact visual-evidence interface that preserves spatial precision and supports low-overhead decoding. Besides, to further improve performance and efficiency, VISUALTHINK-VLA adopts a tailored selective routing mechanism to learn the visual evidence tokens, enabling low-latency inference while preserving high-capacity specialization. We also introduce VisualEvidence-Kit, a supervision-and-audit resource centered on a VisualEvidence-Agent that constructs 754.7k VLA instructions in the VisualEvidence-Set for route supervision and counterfactual faithfulness tests. Across multiple benchmarks and real-robot evaluation, VISUALTHINK-VLA achieves the highest success rate on most benchmarks while reducing the multi-second latency of reasoning-augmented baselines to the sub-second regime. On BridgeData V2, policy-side latency falls from 8.377,s with ECoT to 0.367,s, achieving a 22.8× speedup.

Current Large Language Model (LLM) agents struggle with long-horizon reasoning tasks, such as competition-level mathematics, where sustaining precision over hundreds of steps is critical. A primary bottleneck is the reliance on natural language context or summaries to track progress; these linguistic representations are inherently "lossy," introducing semantic drift and accumulating errors that derail the reasoning chain. To address this, we propose Structured Strategy Folding (SSF), a novel paradigm that shifts the agent’s memory mechanism from linguistic description to computational verification. Instead of compressing history into text, SSF "folds" the reasoning trajectory into a sequence of Executable Symbolic States (ESS). Each ESS serves as a verifiable anchor—comprising either executed code artifacts or formally judged symbolic lemmas—generated through a dual-pathway validation mechanism. By interacting with these rigorous state artifacts rather than raw textual history, the agent effectively eliminates ambiguity and prevents error propagation. Experiments on challenging mathematical benchmarks demonstrate that SSF significantly outperforms standard Chain-of-Thought and existing summarization baselines, achieving substantial accuracy improvements while maintaining robust performance over extended reasoning horizons.

Standard tokenizers over-fragment domain terms, disrupting morpheme semantics. We characterize this representational misalignment as Structural Knowledge Collapse (SKC), where attention mechanisms fail to reconstruct coherent concepts from fragmented inputs. While existing input-centric solutions like vocabulary expansion address this, they necessitate expensive embedding retraining and neglect internal attention compositionality. To this end, we introduce Morpheme-aware KV-aggregation Attention (MorphKA), a lightweight adapter that dynamically consolidates fragments without tokenizer changes. Bypassing tokenizer retraining, MorphKA employs a dual-phase strategy, Input-Level Morpheme Aggregation (IMA) and Context-Aware KV-Aggregation (AMRF), to stabilize morpheme spans and synthesize higher-order concepts. Experiments on medical and legal benchmarks show MorphKA outperforms vocabulary adaptation baselines by 3.2–4.6%, reaching 7.9% on high-fragmentation terms. Moreover, MorphKA reduces catastrophic interference on general capabilities by 18–22% with ~80% fewer parameters than embedding retraining approaches.

Deductive reasoning is a crucial cognitive ability of humanity, allowing us to derive valid conclusions from premises and observations. However, existing works mainly focus on language-based premises and generally neglect deductive reasoning from visual observations. In this work, we introduce rule bAsed futuRe-inference deducTion (ART), which aims at deducing the correct future event based on the visual phenomenon (a video) and the rule-based premises, along with an explanation of the reasoning process. To advance this field, we construct a large-scale densely annotated dataset (Video-ART), where the premises, future event candidates, the reasoning process explanation, and auxiliary commonsense knowledge (e.g., actions and appearance) are annotated by annotators. Upon Video-ART, we develop a strong baseline named ARTNet. In essence, guided by commonsense knowledge, ARTNet learns to identify the target video character and perceives its visual clues related to the future event. Then, ARTNet rigorously applies the given premises to conduct reasoning from the identified information to future events, through a non-parametric rule reasoning network and a reasoning-path review module. Empirical studies validate the rationality of ARTNet in deductive reasoning upon visual observations and the effectiveness over existing works.