EMNLP2025

Theorem-Validated Reverse Chain-of-Thought Problem Generation for Geometric Reasoning

Linger Deng, Linghao Zhu, Yuliang Liu, Yu Wang, Qunyi Xie, Jingjing Wu, Gang Zhang, Yingying Zhu, Xiang Bai

Abstract

Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) face limitations in geometric reasoning due to insufficient Chain of Thought (CoT) image-text training data. While existing approaches leverage template-based or LLM-assisted methods for geometric CoT data creation, they often face challenges in achieving both diversity and precision. To bridge this gap, we introduce a twostage Theorem-Validated Reverse Chain-of-Thought Reasoning Synthesis (TR-CoT) framework. The first stage, TR-Engine, synthesizes theorem-grounded geometric diagrams with structured descriptions and properties. The second stage, TR-Reasoner, employs reverse reasoning to iteratively refine question-answer pairs by cross-validating geometric properties and description fragments. Our approach expands theorem-type coverage, corrects longstanding misunderstandings, and enhances geometric reasoning. Fine-grained CoT enhances theorem understanding and improves logical consistency by 24.5%.. Our best models surpass the baselines in MathVista and GeoQA by 10.1% and 4.7%, outperforming advanced closed-source models like GPT-4o. The code is available at https://github.com/dle666/ R-CoT .