functional token

ATLAS: Unified Agentic and Latent Visual Reasoning via Functional Tokens

ATLAS proposes a framework where a single discrete 'functional token' serves dual roles as both an agentic operation trigger and a latent visual reasoning unit in multimodal models. This design avoids the computational cost of generating intermediate images while sidestepping the context-switching latency of external tool calls and the generalization limitations of pure latent methods. The framework is compatible with standard SFT and RL training pipelines without architectural changes, and introduces Latent-Anchored GRPO (LA-GRPO) to stabilize reinforcement learning when functional tokens are sparse. Experiments show strong performance on visual reasoning benchmarks with maintained interpretability.