Model Guides You How to Draw: Adaptive Visual Gating for Unified Multimodal Reasoning
Unified multimodal models (UMMs) with interleaved reasoning, which generate both textual and visual steps as part of intermediate reasoning traces, have demonstrated great potential for visual mathematical reasoning tasks. However, we identify a key insight in this paradigm: generating intermediate visual reasoning steps is not always beneficial and can even be harmful, as self-generated visual steps may introduce erroneous visual evidence that misleads subsequent reasoning. Moreover, frequently triggering visual steps during reasoning incurs substantial computational and memory overhead, degrading inference efficiency. To address these accuracy and efficiency challenges, we observe that the model's internal signals can indicate whether a visual step will benefit reasoning before the entire visual generation is completed. Specifically, this work identifies two internal signals: 1) Generation Intent, which reflects whether the model has a concrete textual plan for what to draw, and 2) Visual Fidelity, which measures whether the visual generation remains grounded in the original input image. Leveraging these internal signals, we propose AdaViG, a training-free adaptive visual gating method for unified multimodal reasoning. AdaViG dynamically evaluates each triggered visual step at an early visual generation stage and aborts it when both signals are weak, thereby preventing misleading visual evidence from entering the reasoning trace while avoiding unnecessary computation. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that AdaViG improves accuracy by up to 5.7% while reducing visual generation FLOPs by 25.0%-91.0% and wall-clock latency by 15.4%-45.6%.