SPLIT-RL introduces a staged post‑training method that separates visual reasoning (VR) and language reasoning (LR) into distinct phases, allowing each phase to be optimized with a phase‑specific reward. The approach includes Claim‑Level Advantage (CLA‑GRPO), which breaks VR rollouts into atomic visual claims and assigns fine‑grained advantages based on visual‑type group formation. Experiments on Qwen3‑VL and InternVL models show that SPLIT‑RL improves average accuracy by 1.4–6.1 points over GRPO and enhances both VR and LR capabilities.
arXiv:2608.21595v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) improves the reasoning ability of vision-language models (VLMs), and diversifying the rollouts wi...
arXiv:2606. 11209v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Visual question answering increasingly requires multi-step reasoning.
The paper introduces Perception and Reasoning Attribution (PARA), a method that quantifies how much of a vision‑language model’s errors can be fixed by better perception versus stronger reasoning. PARA reveals that reinforcement learning (RL) benefits more from improving reasoning than perception, and motivates a new group‑relative attention distillation objective called GRAD. GRAD directly guides weaker rollouts toward the visual attention patterns of the best rollouts, consistently boosting performance across multiple model scales and benchmarks.
arXiv:2609.39168v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has improved the reasoning capabilities of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), yet existing...
The paper introduces Stepwise Marginal Information Gain (MIG), an intrinsic process reward that evaluates how each reasoning step of a large language model (LLM) or vision-language model (VLM) improves the likelihood of the reference answer. MIG rewards only new likelihood maxima, preventing duplicate credit, and is combined with outcome, format, and self‑distillation objectives to guide training. Experiments on eight benchmarks show that this method outperforms outcome‑only reinforcement learning and improves accuracy by up to 4.8 points over binary‑reward training, including a 12.6‑point gain on MathVerse and a 12.9‑point advantage on vision‑language transfer at 7B parameters.
arXiv:2605. 14054v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Achieving robust perception-reasoning synergy is a central goal for advanced Vision-Language Models (VLMs).
The paper demonstrates that reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) can improve vision‑language benchmark performance even when models are trained without visual input. When real images are introduced at test time, models trained blind recover about half of the performance gain at 3B parameters and nearly four‑fifths at 7B, but extended real‑image training can erode grounding while benchmark gains persist. The authors propose a visual resolvability rule and show that requiring visual evidence for correct answers leads to significant improvements in target discovery and generalization to unseen question types, while controls confirm that the gains stem from actual visual grounding rather than artifacts.
arXiv:2601.08010v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Vision-language models achieve strong performance across a wide range of multimodal understanding and reasoning tasks, yet their multi-step reasoni...
arXiv:2508. 03556v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Process Reward Model (PRM) is widely used in the post-training of Large Language Model (LLM) because it can perform fine-grained evaluation of the reasoning steps of generated content.
The paper introduces EASE, a method that enhances multimodal reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) by adding visual‑evidence process supervision. EASE transforms annotated evidence regions into smoothed visual‑token targets and uses them to guide attention during RL training, but only on high‑reward trajectories. Experiments on Qwen2.5‑VL‑7B, Qwen3‑VL‑4B, and Qwen3‑VL‑8B show that EASE improves average scores over DAPO by 2.5 to 3.1 points across perception, hallucination, visual math, and multimodal reasoning benchmarks, and diagnostics confirm better alignment of visual attention with annotated evidence.
Vision Language Models (VLMs) demonstrate strong perceptual abilities but remain limited in tasks requiring analytical reasoning across multiple visual states, such as multi-image comparison, change detection, and multi-step visual inference. These capabilities are critical for real-world multimodal applications where reasoning must be grounded in systematic differences between visual contexts.
arXiv:2607. 12815v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting is widely used as a test-time scaling strategy for Vision-Language Models (VLMs), but it remains unclear what is extended when VLMs generate longer reasoning traces.