ACL 2025long0 citations

MM-Verify: Enhancing Multimodal Reasoning with Chain-of-Thought Verification

Linzhuang Sun, Hao Liang, Jingxuan Wei, Bihui Yu, Tianpeng Li, Fan Yang, Zenan Zhou, Wentao Zhang

Abstract

According to the Test-Time Scaling, the integration of External Slow-Thinking with the Verify mechanism has been demonstrated to enhance multi-round reasoning in large language models (LLMs). However, in the multimodal (MM) domain, there is still a lack of a strong MM-Verifier. In this paper, we introduce MM-Verifier and MM-Reasoner to enhance multimodal reasoning through longer inference and more robust verification. First, we propose a two-step MM verification data synthesis method, which combines a simulation-based tree search with verification and uses rejection sampling to generate high-quality Chain-of-Thought (COT) data. This data is then used to fine-tune the verification model, MM-Verifier. Additionally, we present a more efficient method for synthesizing MMCOT data, bridging the gap between text-based and multimodal reasoning. The synthesized data is used to fine-tune MM-Reasoner. Our MM-Verifier outperforms all larger models on the MathCheck, MathVista, and MathVerse benchmarks. Moreover, MM-Reasoner demonstrates strong effectiveness and scalability, with performance improving as data size increases. Finally, our approach achieves strong performance when combining MM-Reasoner and MM-Verifier, reaching an accuracy of 65.3 on MathVista, surpassing GPT-4o (63.8) with 12 rollouts.

BibTeX
@inproceedings{sun-etal-2025-mm,
    title = "{MM}-Verify: Enhancing Multimodal Reasoning with Chain-of-Thought Verification",
    author = "Sun, Linzhuang  and
      Liang, Hao  and
      Wei, Jingxuan  and
      Yu, Bihui  and
      Li, Tianpeng  and
      Yang, Fan  and
      Zhou, Zenan  and
      Zhang, Wentao",
    editor = "Che, Wanxiang  and
      Nabende, Joyce  and
      Shutova, Ekaterina  and
      Pilehvar, Mohammad Taher",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
    month = jul,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Vienna, Austria",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2025.acl-long.689/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2025.acl-long.689",
    pages = "14100--14115",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-251-0"
}
MM-Verify: Enhancing Multimodal Reasoning with Chain-of-Thought Verification · ACL 2025