SophiaVL-R1: Reinforcing MLLMs Reasoning with Thinking Reward

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Fan, Kaixuan, Feng, Kaituo, Lyu, Haoming, Zhou, Dongzhan, Yue, Xiangyu
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Fan, Kaixuan
Feng, Kaituo
Lyu, Haoming
Zhou, Dongzhan
Yue, Xiangyu
author_facet Fan, Kaixuan
Feng, Kaituo
Lyu, Haoming
Zhou, Dongzhan
Yue, Xiangyu
contents Recent advances have shown success in eliciting strong reasoning abilities in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) through rule-based reinforcement learning (RL) with outcome rewards. However, this paradigm typically lacks supervision over the thinking process leading to the final outcome. As a result, the model may learn sub-optimal reasoning strategies, which can hinder its generalization ability. In light of this, we propose SophiaVL-R1, as an attempt to add reward signals for the thinking process in this paradigm. To achieve this, we first train a thinking reward model that evaluates the quality of the entire thinking process. Given that the thinking reward may be unreliable for certain samples due to reward hacking, we propose the Trust-GRPO method, which assigns a trustworthiness weight to the thinking reward during training. This weight is computed based on the thinking reward comparison of responses leading to correct answers versus incorrect answers, helping to mitigate the impact of potentially unreliable thinking rewards. Moreover, we design an annealing training strategy that gradually reduces the thinking reward over time, allowing the model to rely more on the accurate rule-based outcome reward in later training stages. Experiments show that our SophiaVL-R1 surpasses a series of reasoning MLLMs on various benchmarks (e.g., MathVisita, MMMU), demonstrating strong reasoning and generalization capabilities. Notably, our SophiaVL-R1-7B even outperforms LLaVA-OneVision-72B on most benchmarks, despite the latter having 10 times more parameters. All code, models, and datasets are made publicly available at https://github.com/kxfan2002/SophiaVL-R1.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_17018
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle SophiaVL-R1: Reinforcing MLLMs Reasoning with Thinking Reward
Fan, Kaixuan
Feng, Kaituo
Lyu, Haoming
Zhou, Dongzhan
Yue, Xiangyu
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Recent advances have shown success in eliciting strong reasoning abilities in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) through rule-based reinforcement learning (RL) with outcome rewards. However, this paradigm typically lacks supervision over the thinking process leading to the final outcome. As a result, the model may learn sub-optimal reasoning strategies, which can hinder its generalization ability. In light of this, we propose SophiaVL-R1, as an attempt to add reward signals for the thinking process in this paradigm. To achieve this, we first train a thinking reward model that evaluates the quality of the entire thinking process. Given that the thinking reward may be unreliable for certain samples due to reward hacking, we propose the Trust-GRPO method, which assigns a trustworthiness weight to the thinking reward during training. This weight is computed based on the thinking reward comparison of responses leading to correct answers versus incorrect answers, helping to mitigate the impact of potentially unreliable thinking rewards. Moreover, we design an annealing training strategy that gradually reduces the thinking reward over time, allowing the model to rely more on the accurate rule-based outcome reward in later training stages. Experiments show that our SophiaVL-R1 surpasses a series of reasoning MLLMs on various benchmarks (e.g., MathVisita, MMMU), demonstrating strong reasoning and generalization capabilities. Notably, our SophiaVL-R1-7B even outperforms LLaVA-OneVision-72B on most benchmarks, despite the latter having 10 times more parameters. All code, models, and datasets are made publicly available at https://github.com/kxfan2002/SophiaVL-R1.
title SophiaVL-R1: Reinforcing MLLMs Reasoning with Thinking Reward
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.17018