Vision-language models benefit from high-resolution images, but the increase in visual-token count incurs high compute overhead. Humans resolve this tension via foveation: a coarse view guides "where to look", while selectively acquired high-acuity evidence refines "what to think". We introduce Foveated Reasoner, an autoregressive vision-language framework that unifies foveation and reasoning within a single decoding trajectory. Starting from a low-resolution view, the model triggers foveation only when needed, retrieves high-resolution evidence from selected regions, and injects it back into the same decoding trajectory. We train the method with a two-stage pipeline: coldstart supervision to bootstrap foveation behavior, followed by reinforcement learning to jointly improve evidence acquisition and task accuracy while discouraging trivial "see-everything" solutions. Experiments show that the method learns effective foveation policies and achieves stronger accuracy under tight visual-token budgets across multiple vision-language benchmarks.
@article{arxiv.2604.21079,
title = {Foveated Reasoning: Stateful, Action-based Visual Focusing for Vision-Language Models},
author = {Juhong Min and Lazar Valkov and Vitali Petsiuk and Hossein Souri and Deen Dayal Mohan},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.21079},
year = {2026}
}