Title: RECODE: Reasoning Through Code Generation for Visual Question Answering
Primary area: foundation or frontier models, including LLMs
Keywords: visual reasoning agent, code generation

Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) struggle with precise reasoning for structured visuals like charts and diagrams, as   pixel-based perception lacks a mechanism for verification. To address this, we propose to leverage derendering---the process of reverse-engineering visuals into executable code---as a new modality for verifiable visual reasoning. Specifically, we propose RECODE, an agentic framework that  first generates multiple candidate programs to reproduce the input image. It then uses a critic to select the most faithful reconstruction and iteratively refines the code. This process not only transforms an ambiguous perceptual task into a verifiable, symbolic problem, but also enables precise calculations and logical inferences later on. On various visual reasoning benchmarks such as CharXiv, ChartQA, and Geometry3K, RECODE  significantly outperforms methods that do not leverage code or only use code for drawing auxiliary lines or cropping. Our work demonstrates that grounding visual perception in executable code provides a new path toward more accurate and verifiable multimodal reasoning.