ATLAS 用单个词解决视觉推理中计算开销和泛化难题，做多模态或视觉推理的开发者可以直接参考其设计思路，值得关注。
ATLAS 提出了一种新框架，用一个离散的“功能标记”（functional token）同时作为代理操作和潜在视觉推理单元，避免了传统方法中生成中间视觉内容的高计算成本。该标记无需视觉监督，保持标准词汇表格式，可通过下一个词预测生成，兼容标准 SFT 和 RL 训练。针对强化学习中功能标记稀疏的问题，引入 Latent-Anchored GRPO 稳定训练。实验表明 ATLAS 在挑战性基准上表现优异且可解释性强。这项工作为视觉推理研究提供了新范式。
ATLAS: Agentic or Latent Visual Reasoning? One Word is Enough for Both
Visual reasoning, often interleaved with intermediate visual states, has emerged as a promising direction in the field. A straightforward approach is to directly generate images via unified models during reasoning, but this is computationally expensive and architecturally non-trivial. Recent alternatives include agentic reasoning through code or tool calls, and latent reasoning with learnable hidden embeddings. However, agentic methods incur context-switching latency from external execution, while latent methods lack task generalization and are difficult to train with autoregressive parallelization. To combine their strengths while mitigating their limitations, we propose ATLAS, a framework in which a single discrete 'word', termed as a functional token, serves both as an agentic operation and a latent visual reasoning unit. Each functional token is associated with an internalized visual operation, yet requires no visual supervision and remains a standard token in the tokenizer vocabulary, which can be generated via next-token prediction. This design avoids verbose intermediate visual content generation, while preserving compatibility with the vanilla scalable SFT and RL training, without architectural or methodological modifications. To further address the sparsity of functional tokens during RL, we introduce Latent-Anchored GRPO (LA-GRPO), which stabilizes the training by anchoring functional tokens with a statically weighted auxiliary objective, providing stronger gradient updates. Extensive experiments and analyses demonstrate that ATLAS achieves superior performance on challenging benchmarks while maintaining clear interpretability. We hope ATLAS offers a new paradigm inspiring future visual reasoning research.