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Reinforced mllm: A survey on rl-based reasoning in multimodal large language models

12 Pith papers cite this work. Polarity classification is still indexing.

12 Pith papers citing it
abstract

The application of reinforcement learning (RL) to enhance the reasoning capabilities of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) constitutes a rapidly advancing research area. While MLLMs extend Large Language Models (LLMs) to handle diverse modalities such as vision, audio, and video, enabling robust reasoning across multimodal inputs remains challenging. This paper provides a systematic review of recent advances in RL-based reasoning for MLLMs, covering key algorithmic designs, reward mechanism innovations, and practical applications. We highlight two main RL paradigms, value-model-free and value-model-based methods, and analyze how RL enhances reasoning abilities by optimizing reasoning trajectories and aligning multimodal information. Additionally, we provide an extensive overview of benchmark datasets, evaluation protocols, and current limitations, and propose future research directions to address challenges such as sparse rewards, inefficient cross-modal reasoning, and real-world deployment constraints. Our goal is to provide a comprehensive and structured guide to RL-based multimodal reasoning.

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2026 10 2025 2

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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.

OneThinker: All-in-one Reasoning Model for Image and Video

cs.CV · 2025-12-02 · unverdicted · novelty 5.0

OneThinker unifies image and video reasoning in one model across 10 tasks via a 600k corpus, CoT-annotated SFT, and EMA-GRPO reinforcement learning, reporting strong results on 31 benchmarks plus some cross-task transfer.

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