MIND: Multi-rationale INtegrated Discriminative Reasoning Framework for Multi-modal Large Models

Abstract

Recently, multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have been widely applied to reasoning tasks. However, they suffer from limited multi-rationale semantic modeling, insufficient logical robustness, and susceptibility to misleading cues. Therefore, we propose a Multi-rationale INtegrated Discriminative (MIND) reasoning framework, which is designed to endow MLLMs with human-like cognitive abilities of "Understand -> Rethink -> Correct", and achieves a paradigm evolution from passive imitation-based reasoning to active discriminative reasoning. Specifically, we introduce a Rationale Augmentation and Discrimination (RAD) paradigm, which provides a unified and extensible data foundation. Meanwhile, we design a Progressive Two-stage Correction Learning (P2CL) strategy. The first phase enhances multi-rationale positive learning, while the second phase enables active logic discrimination and correction. In addition, to mitigate representation entanglement in the multi-rationale semantic space, we propose a Multi-rationale Contrastive Alignment (MCA) optimization strategy. Extensive experiments show that our MIND achieves SOTA performance on multiple public datasets. Our data and code are available at https://github.com/YuChuang1205/MIND