Paper · arXiv 2609.38426
LoopVL: Recurrent Visual Intelligence
Zhe Qian, Ziyang Gong, Zhongxing Xu, Hehan Li, Zhonghua Wang, Fei Luo, Mingxuan Wang, Xue Yang, Shiwei liu, Yanbiao Ma, Junchi Yan, Jungong Han
LoopVL extends Loop Transformers to vision-language modeling by iteratively updating a shared multimodal state, improving reasoning and revealing dynamic visual attention shifts.
Abstract
We introduce LoopVL to study whether Loop Transformers can be effectively extended to vision- language models. LoopVL combines Module-Loop and Model-Loop computation to iteratively update a unified vision-language state through shared modules. We train LoopVL from scratch through language pre-training, multimodal training, and post-training. LoopVL outperforms a range of similarly sized and larger non-recurrent models on multimodal understanding and visual reasoning benchmarks. We also observe Visual Aha Moments in LoopVL, characterized by pronounced shifts in visual attention across loops. LoopVL provides practical evidence for recurrent vision-language modeling and offers an intuitive perspective on how shared parameters can support deeper multimodal computation over continuously evolving visual-language states.