Infi-MMR: Curriculum-based Unlocking Multimodal Reasoning via Phased Reinforcement Learning in Multimodal Small Language Models

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Main Authors: Liu, Zeyu, Liu, Yuhang, Zhu, Guanghao, Xie, Congkai, Li, Zhen, Yuan, Jianbo, Wang, Xinyao, Li, Qing, Cheung, Shing-Chi, Zhang, Shengyu, Wu, Fei, Yang, Hongxia
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Published: 2025
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author Liu, Zeyu
Liu, Yuhang
Zhu, Guanghao
Xie, Congkai
Li, Zhen
Yuan, Jianbo
Wang, Xinyao
Li, Qing
Cheung, Shing-Chi
Zhang, Shengyu
Wu, Fei
Yang, Hongxia
author_facet Liu, Zeyu
Liu, Yuhang
Zhu, Guanghao
Xie, Congkai
Li, Zhen
Yuan, Jianbo
Wang, Xinyao
Li, Qing
Cheung, Shing-Chi
Zhang, Shengyu
Wu, Fei
Yang, Hongxia
contents Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated substantial progress in reasoning capabilities, such as DeepSeek-R1, which leverages rule-based reinforcement learning to enhance logical reasoning significantly. However, extending these achievements to multimodal large language models (MLLMs) presents critical challenges, which are frequently more pronounced for Multimodal Small Language Models (MSLMs) given their typically weaker foundational reasoning abilities: (1) the scarcity of high-quality multimodal reasoning datasets, (2) the degradation of reasoning capabilities due to the integration of visual processing, and (3) the risk that direct application of reinforcement learning may produce complex yet incorrect reasoning processes. To address these challenges, we design a novel framework Infi-MMR to systematically unlock the reasoning potential of MSLMs through a curriculum of three carefully structured phases and propose our multimodal reasoning model Infi-MMR-3B. The first phase, Foundational Reasoning Activation, leverages high-quality textual reasoning datasets to activate and strengthen the model's logical reasoning capabilities. The second phase, Cross-Modal Reasoning Adaptation, utilizes caption-augmented multimodal data to facilitate the progressive transfer of reasoning skills to multimodal contexts. The third phase, Multimodal Reasoning Enhancement, employs curated, caption-free multimodal data to mitigate linguistic biases and promote robust cross-modal reasoning. Infi-MMR-3B achieves both state-of-the-art multimodal math reasoning ability (43.68% on MathVerse testmini, 27.04% on MathVision test, and 21.33% on OlympiadBench) and general reasoning ability (67.2% on MathVista testmini). Resources are available at https://huggingface.co/Reallm-Labs/Infi-MMR-3B.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_23091
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Infi-MMR: Curriculum-based Unlocking Multimodal Reasoning via Phased Reinforcement Learning in Multimodal Small Language Models
Liu, Zeyu
Liu, Yuhang
Zhu, Guanghao
Xie, Congkai
Li, Zhen
Yuan, Jianbo
Wang, Xinyao
Li, Qing
Cheung, Shing-Chi
Zhang, Shengyu
Wu, Fei
Yang, Hongxia
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated substantial progress in reasoning capabilities, such as DeepSeek-R1, which leverages rule-based reinforcement learning to enhance logical reasoning significantly. However, extending these achievements to multimodal large language models (MLLMs) presents critical challenges, which are frequently more pronounced for Multimodal Small Language Models (MSLMs) given their typically weaker foundational reasoning abilities: (1) the scarcity of high-quality multimodal reasoning datasets, (2) the degradation of reasoning capabilities due to the integration of visual processing, and (3) the risk that direct application of reinforcement learning may produce complex yet incorrect reasoning processes. To address these challenges, we design a novel framework Infi-MMR to systematically unlock the reasoning potential of MSLMs through a curriculum of three carefully structured phases and propose our multimodal reasoning model Infi-MMR-3B. The first phase, Foundational Reasoning Activation, leverages high-quality textual reasoning datasets to activate and strengthen the model's logical reasoning capabilities. The second phase, Cross-Modal Reasoning Adaptation, utilizes caption-augmented multimodal data to facilitate the progressive transfer of reasoning skills to multimodal contexts. The third phase, Multimodal Reasoning Enhancement, employs curated, caption-free multimodal data to mitigate linguistic biases and promote robust cross-modal reasoning. Infi-MMR-3B achieves both state-of-the-art multimodal math reasoning ability (43.68% on MathVerse testmini, 27.04% on MathVision test, and 21.33% on OlympiadBench) and general reasoning ability (67.2% on MathVista testmini). Resources are available at https://huggingface.co/Reallm-Labs/Infi-MMR-3B.
title Infi-MMR: Curriculum-based Unlocking Multimodal Reasoning via Phased Reinforcement Learning in Multimodal Small Language Models
topic Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.23091