MetaTide: Bringing Evolving Seeds into Multimodal Reasoning via Metacognitive Interflow

Multimodal reasoning increasingly combines visual evidence with multi-step inference, while metacognitive regulation helps models assess and adjust an ongoing solution. A central challenge is how the understanding gained from these judgments and adjustments can persist and guide future problems. We introduce MetaTide, a framework that brings evolving metacognitive seeds into current reasoning through Metacognitive Interflow. Stored in a Metacognitive Undercurrent, these seeds capture transferable relations among cognitive conditions, regulatory choices, and observed effects. Metacognitive Interflow matches the current Meta-State to an applicable seed and translates it into second-order control, which guides task-specific observation and inference in Surface Reasoning. In this way, seeds shape how the model observes, evaluates, and adjusts its reasoning in a new task. The outcomes of these actions refine its ongoing assessment, and completed solutions are distilled into new or consolidated seeds. This reciprocal flow allows prior self-understanding to shape present reasoning while present reasoning renews the basis for future regulation. Experiments across five multimodal benchmarks show gains of +29.03 and +22.58 percentage points over ReasoningBank on MATH-Vision and MuirBench, respectively.