Machine Mental Imagery: Empower Multimodal Reasoning with Latent Visual Tokens

Zeyuan Yang, Xueyang Yu, Delin Chen, Maohao Shen, Chuang Gan; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2026, pp. 33510-33520

Vision-language models (VLMs) excel at multimodal understanding, yet their text-only decoding forces them to verbalize visual reasoning, limiting performance on tasks that demand visual imagination. Recent attempts train VLMs to render explicit images, but the heavy image-generation pre-training often hinders the reasoning ability. Inspired by the way humans reason with mental imagery--the internal construction and manipulation of visual cues--we investigate whether VLMs can reason through interleaved multimodal trajectories without producing explicit images. To this end, we present a Machine Mental Imagery framework, dubbed as "Mirage", which augments VLM decoding with latent visual tokens alongside ordinary text. Concretely, whenever the model chooses to "think visually", it recasts its hidden states as next tokens, thereby continuing a multimodal trajectory without generating pixel-level images. Begin by supervising the latent tokens through distillation from ground-truth image embeddings, we then switch to text-only supervision to make the latent trajectory align tightly with the task objective. A subsequent reinforcement learning stage further enhances the multimodal reasoning capability. Experiments on diverse benchmarks demonstrate that \Model unlocks stronger multimodal reasoning without explicit image generation.