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VL-Rethinker: Incentivizing Self-Reflection of Vision-Language Models with Reinforcement Learning

Baseline reference. 50% of citing Pith papers use this work as a benchmark or comparison.

64 Pith papers citing it
Baseline 50% of classified citations
abstract

Recently, slow-thinking systems like GPT-o1 and DeepSeek-R1 have demonstrated great potential in solving challenging problems through explicit reflection. They significantly outperform the best fast-thinking models, such as GPT-4o, on various math and science benchmarks. However, their multimodal reasoning capabilities remain on par with fast-thinking models. For instance, GPT-o1's performance on benchmarks like MathVista, MathVerse, and MathVision is similar to fast-thinking models. In this paper, we aim to enhance the slow-thinking capabilities of vision-language models using reinforcement learning (without relying on distillation) to advance the state of the art. First, we adapt the GRPO algorithm with a novel technique called Selective Sample Replay (SSR) to address the vanishing advantages problem. While this approach yields strong performance, the resulting RL-trained models exhibit limited self-reflection or self-verification. To further encourage slow-thinking, we introduce Forced Rethinking, which appends a rethinking trigger token to the end of rollouts in RL training, explicitly enforcing a self-reflection reasoning step. By combining these two techniques, our model, VL-Rethinker, advances state-of-the-art scores on MathVista, MathVerse to achieve 80.4%, 63.5% respectively. VL-Rethinker also achieves open-source SoTA on multi-disciplinary benchmarks such as MathVision, MMMU-Pro, EMMA, and MEGA-Bench, narrowing the gap with OpenAI-o1. Our empirical results show the effectiveness of our approaches.

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representative citing papers

Zone of Proximal Policy Optimization: Teacher in Prompts, Not Gradients

cs.CL · 2026-06-16 · unverdicted · novelty 7.0

ZPPO improves distillation to small vision-language models by using binary and negative candidate prompts plus a replay buffer for hard questions, outperforming standard distillation and GRPO on a 31-benchmark suite with largest gains at the 0.8B scale.

Latent Visual Reasoning

cs.CV · 2025-09-29 · unverdicted · novelty 7.0

Latent Visual Reasoning enables autoregressive generation of latent visual states that reconstruct critical image tokens, yielding gains on perception-heavy VQA benchmarks such as 71.67% on MMVP.

VGR: Visual Grounded Reasoning

cs.CV · 2025-06-13 · unverdicted · novelty 7.0

VGR introduces a visual-grounded reasoning MLLM that detects and replays image regions during inference, achieving gains on visual benchmarks with 30% fewer image tokens than the LLaVA-NeXT-7B baseline.

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Showing 50 of 64 citing papers.