Generative Universal Verifier as Multimodal Meta-Reasoner

Abstract

We introduce *Generative Universal Verifier*, a novel concept and plugin designed for next-generation multimodal reasoning in vision-language models and unified multimodal models, providing the fundamental capability of reflection and refinement on visual outcomes during the reasoning and generation process. This work makes three main contributions: (1) We build **ViVerBench**, a comprehensive benchmark spanning $16$ categories of critical tasks for evaluating visual outcomes in multimodal reasoning. Results show that existing VLMs consistently underperform across these tasks, underscoring a substantial gap from human-level capability in reliable visual verification. (2) We design two automated pipelines to construct large-scale visual verification data and train **OmniVerifier-7B**, the first omni-capable generative verifier trained for universal visual verification and achieves notable gains on ViVerBench(+$8.3$). Through training, we identify three atomic capabilities in visual verification and demonstrate how they generalize and interact synergistically. (3) We propose **OmniVerifier-TTS**, a sequential test-time scaling paradigm that leverages the universal verifier to bridge image generation and editing within unified models, enhancing the upper bound of generative ability through iterative fine-grained optimization. Beyond generation, we extend universal verifier to broader world-modeling interleaved reasoning scenarios. Empirically, OmniVerifier-TTS achieves improvements on T2I-ReasonBench(+$3.7$), and GenEval++(+$4.3$), outperforming existing parallel test-time scaling methods, such as Best-of-N. By endowing multimodal reasoning with reliable visual verification, OmniVerifier advances both reliable reflection during generation and scalable test-time refinement, marking a step toward more trustworthy and controllable next-generation reasoning systems.

Cite

Text

Zhang et al. "Generative Universal Verifier as Multimodal Meta-Reasoner." International Conference on Learning Representations, 2026.

Markdown

[Zhang et al. "Generative Universal Verifier as Multimodal Meta-Reasoner." International Conference on Learning Representations, 2026.](https://mlanthology.org/iclr/2026/zhang2026iclr-generative/)

BibTeX

@inproceedings{zhang2026iclr-generative,
  title     = {{Generative Universal Verifier as Multimodal Meta-Reasoner}},
  author    = {Zhang, Xinchen and Zhang, Xiaoying and Wu, Youbin and Cao, Yanbin and Zhang, Renrui and Chu, Ruihang and Yang, Ling and Yang, Yujiu and Shi, Guang},
  booktitle = {International Conference on Learning Representations},
  year      = {2026},
  url       = {https://mlanthology.org/iclr/2026/zhang2026iclr-generative/}
}