# Distilling Visual Reasoning into Text Space

Authors: Wenhan Yang, Nilay Naharas, Ali Payani, Baharan Mirzasoleiman.

Distills a teacher's interleaved visual and textual reasoning into a student that no longer generates intermediate visual representations. The student still writes a textual chain of thought; what is internalized is the visual portion of the reasoning.

First public: 2026-09-28.
ArXiv initial submission: 2026-09-28.

[Original paper](https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.34408) · [Reading-list entry](https://latent-implicit-thinking.github.io/papers/2609.34408/)
[Preprint BibTeX](https://latent-implicit-thinking.github.io/papers/2609.34408/citation.bib) · [Preprint CSL-JSON](https://latent-implicit-thinking.github.io/papers/2609.34408/citation.csl.json) · [JSON record](https://latent-implicit-thinking.github.io/papers/2609.34408/record.json)

## Approaches

- [Internalized reasoning](https://latent-implicit-thinking.github.io/topics/internalized-reasoning/): Learn from worked solutions so that some or all of the reasoning can later happen without writing those steps. Training may use a separate teacher model or progressively remove written steps from the model being trained.

Summary and categories are editorial. Read the original paper to verify claims and limitations. A citation to a paper does not, by itself, establish that a later method builds on it.

Reading-list version 0.9.5; literature checked through 2026-10-18.