LatentWeave: Test-Time Latent Optimization for Multimodal Reasoning

Abstract

Recent advances in test-time optimization have shown that the multimodal reasoning performance of large multimodal language models (MLLMs) can be improved during inference without modifying backbone model parameters. However, existing approaches primarily operate at the prompt or output level, leaving the latent reasoning process largely uncontrolled and insufficient to prevent error accumulation during autoregressive generation. To address this limitation, we propose LatentWeave, a test-time framework that treats multimodal reasoning as a controllable latent trajectory. LatentWeave performs structured Latent Weaving, progressively refining intermediate hidden states segment-wise to correct emerging deviations, and further introduces Reasoning Anchors via lightweight WEAVE tokens to stabilize reasoning structure and guide answer-oriented generation. These mechanisms are designed to enable fine-grained, step-aware intervention in the latent reasoning process while keeping the main MLLM backbone parameters fixed. Extensive experiments across diverse multimodal reasoning benchmarks report improvements over the evaluated baselines; the contribution of latent optimization, anchor training, and additional test-time computation is analyzed separately in the ablation and efficiency studies. Our code is available at https://github.com/jins7/LatentWeave.