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

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Wang, Haozhe, Qu, Chao, Huang, Zuming, Chu, Wei, Lin, Fangzhen, Chen, Wenhu
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Wang, Haozhe
Qu, Chao
Huang, Zuming
Chu, Wei
Lin, Fangzhen
Chen, Wenhu
author_facet Wang, Haozhe
Qu, Chao
Huang, Zuming
Chu, Wei
Lin, Fangzhen
Chen, Wenhu
contents 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.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_08837
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle VL-Rethinker: Incentivizing Self-Reflection of Vision-Language Models with Reinforcement Learning
Wang, Haozhe
Qu, Chao
Huang, Zuming
Chu, Wei
Lin, Fangzhen
Chen, Wenhu
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
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.
title VL-Rethinker: Incentivizing Self-Reflection of Vision-Language Models with Reinforcement Learning
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.08837