DiffThinker: Towards Generative Multimodal Reasoning with Diffusion Models

Abstract

While recent Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have attained significant strides in multimodal reasoning, their reasoning processes remain predominantly text-centric and fail to visualize and track intermediate visual states during the reasoning process, leading to suboptimal performance in complex long-horizon, vision-centric tasks. Moving beyond the constraints of text-centric reasoning, we establish Generative Multimodal Reasoning as a novel paradigm and introduce DiffThinker, a diffusion-based reasoning framework. Conceptually, DiffThinker reformulates multimodal reasoning as a native generative image-to-image task, where the iterative denoising trajectory naturally serves as a visual reasoning path. This enables the model to track the evolution of visual information throughout the reasoning process. We perform a systematic comparison between DiffThinker and MLLMs, providing the first in-depth investigation into the intrinsic characteristics of this paradigm, revealing four core properties: efficiency, controllability, native parallelism, and collaboration. Extensive experiments across seven tasks demonstrate that DiffThinker significantly outperforms leading closed-source models, including GPT-5 (+314.2%) and Gemini-3-Flash (+111.6%), as well as the fine-tuned Qwen3-VL-32B baseline (+39.0%), highlighting Generative Multimodal Reasoning as a promising approach for vision-centric reasoning.