DeFacto: Counterfactual Thinking with Images for Enforcing Evidence-Grounded and Faithful Reasoning

Recent advances in multimodal language models (MLLMs) have made thinking with images a dominant paradigm for multimodal reasoning. However, existing methods still fail to ensure evidence--answer consistency, where correct answers must be supported by correct visual evidence. To address this issue, we propose DeFacto, a counterfactual reasoning framework that explicitly aligns visual evidence with final answers. Our approach integrates three complementary training paradigms: (i) positive, (ii) counterfactual, and (iii) random-masking. We further develop a language-guided evidence construction pipeline that automatically localizes question-relevant regions and generates counterfactual variants, resulting in DeFacto-100K. Building on this dataset, we train MLLMs with GRPO-based reinforcement learning and design three complementary rewards to promote correct answering, structured reasoning, and consistent evidence selection. Moreover, we introduce DeFacto-1.5K, a human-annotated benchmark for systematically evaluating evidence-grounded consistency beyond answer accuracy. Experiments on diverse benchmarks demonstrate that DeFacto substantially improves both answer accuracy and evidence--answer consistency over strong baselines. The code and datasets are available at https://github.com/tinnel123666888/defacto.