MoLE: Mixture of Latent Experts for Complementary Visual Reasoning

Yingcheng Liu, Tianyi Jiang, Yujuan Ding, jiangbo Ai, Xun Jiang +3

Latent visual reasoning equips vision--language models with continuous intermediate states that can process visual evidence without explicit textual reasoning traces or repeated image operations. However, existing methods often allow multiple latent tokens to access the same visual evidence through shared value projections, providing no mechanism for them to extract complementary visual information; simply increasing the latent budget can therefore yield redundant latent representations. We argue that effective latent reasoning should encourage different latent tokens to extract complementary visual information, and thereby act as specialized visual experts. Based on this insight, we propose MoLE, a Mixture of Latent Experts framework that controls both what visual evidence each latent visual expert observes and how it transforms that evidence. MoLE isolates latent visual experts during evidence extraction and uses dedicated latent summary experts to aggregate the complementary representations of latent visual experts. A two-stage training pipeline first forces visual evidence through this latent pathway and then restores direct visual access, requiring neither predefined expert…