MentalThink: Shaping Thoughts in Mental SVG World

Hugging Face Daily Papers Papers

Summary

MentalThink enables multimodal large language models to perform visual-symbolic reasoning by generating and interpreting SVG code as an intermediate representation for spatial problem-solving.

We introduce MentalThink, a visual-symbolic reasoning paradigm that equips Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) with an executable mechanism for "mental" visualization. The core of MentalThink is a think-with-SVG pipeline, where the model learns to generate, render, and interpret scalable vector graphics (SVG) code as an intermediate visual representation for multi-turn reasoning. By creating structured vector sketches, the model can externalize spatial hypotheses, inspect them through deterministic rendering, and reason within a constrained geometric space, effectively mimicking the human process of mental imagery. We instantiate this paradigm through a two-stage training framework, combining Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) for SVG syntactic alignment with multi-turn Reinforcement Learning (RL) to encourage iterative inspection, revision, and refinement of intermediate visual hypotheses. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that MentalThink achieves superior performance on spatial understanding and reasoning benchmarks (e.g., 55.1% on VSIBench, 76.0% on MindCube), showing that executable vector graphics provide a verifiable visual workspace for dynamic perspective taking, visual reflection, and compositional scene construction.
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Abstract

MentalThink enables multimodal large language models to perform visual-symbolic reasoning by generating and interpreting SVG code as an executable intermediate representation for spatial problem-solving.

We introduce MentalThink, avisual-symbolic reasoningparadigm that equipsMultimodal LLMs(MLLMs) with an executable mechanism for “mental” visualization. The core of MentalThink is athink-with-SVG pipeline, where the model learns to generate, render, and interpretscalable vector graphics(SVG) code as an intermediate visual representation formulti-turn reasoning. By creating structured vector sketches, the model can externalize spatial hypotheses, inspect them through deterministic rendering, and reason within a constrainedgeometric space, effectively mimicking the human process ofmental imagery. We instantiate this paradigm through a two-stage training framework, combiningSupervised Fine-Tuning(SFT) for SVG syntactic alignment with multi-turnReinforcement Learning(RL) to encourage iterative inspection, revision, and refinement of intermediate visual hypotheses. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that MentalThink achieves superior performance onspatial understandingand reasoning benchmarks (e.g., 55.1% on VSIBench, 76.0% on MindCube), showing that executable vector graphics provide a verifiable visual workspace for dynamic perspective taking, visual reflection, and compositional scene construction.

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