@inproceedings{yang-etal-2026-survey,
    title = "A Survey of Multimodal Mathematical Reasoning: From Perception, Alignment to Reasoning",
    author = "Yang, Tianyu  and
      Wu, Sihong  and
      Zhao, Yilun  and
      Liang, Zhenwen  and
      Dai, Lisen  and
      Zhao, Chen  and
      Cheng, Minhao  and
      Cohan, Arman  and
      Zhang, Xiangliang",
    editor = "Liakata, Maria  and
      Moreira, Viviane P.  and
      Zhang, Jiajun  and
      Jurgens, David",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "San Diego, California, United States",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-long.1961/",
    pages = "42386--42408",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-390-6",
    abstract = "Multimodal Mathematical Reasoning (MMR) has recently attracted increasing attention for its capability to solve mathematical problems involving both textual and visual modalities. However, current models still face significant challenges in real-world visual math tasks, often misinterpreting diagrams, failing to align mathematical symbols with visual evidence, or producing inconsistent reasoning steps. Moreover, existing evaluations mainly focus on checking final answers rather than verifying the correctness or executability of each intermediate step. A growing body of recent research addresses these issues by integrating structured perception, explicit alignment, and verifiable reasoning within unified frameworks.To establish a clear roadmap for understanding and comparing different MMR approaches, we systematically review them around four fundamental questions: (1) What to extract from multimodal inputs, (2) How to represent and align textual and visual information, (3) How to perform the reasoning, and (4) How to evaluate the correctness of the overall reasoning process. Finally, we discuss open challenges and share our thoughts on future research directions."
}