MM-HELIX: Boosting Multimodal Long-Chain Reflective Reasoning with Holistic Platform and Adaptive Hybrid Policy Optimization

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Hauptverfasser: Zhao, Xiangyu, Lin, Junming, Liang, Tianhao, Zhou, Yifan, Chai, Wenhao, Gu, Yuzhe, Wang, Weiyun, Chen, Kai, Luo, Gen, Zhang, Wenwei, Yan, Junchi, Yang, Hua, Duan, Haodong, Yang, Xue
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Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Zhao, Xiangyu
Lin, Junming
Liang, Tianhao
Zhou, Yifan
Chai, Wenhao
Gu, Yuzhe
Wang, Weiyun
Chen, Kai
Luo, Gen
Zhang, Wenwei
Yan, Junchi
Yang, Hua
Duan, Haodong
Yang, Xue
author_facet Zhao, Xiangyu
Lin, Junming
Liang, Tianhao
Zhou, Yifan
Chai, Wenhao
Gu, Yuzhe
Wang, Weiyun
Chen, Kai
Luo, Gen
Zhang, Wenwei
Yan, Junchi
Yang, Hua
Duan, Haodong
Yang, Xue
contents While current Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated proficiency in reasoning tasks such as mathematics and logic, their capacity for long-chain reflective reasoning, a prerequisite for solving complex real-world problems, remains largely underexplored. In this work, we first conduct an extensive empirical investigation to evaluate this capability. Leveraging a carefully designed data synthesis engine, we construct MM-HELIX, a multimodal benchmark consisting 1,260 samples of 42 challenging synthetic tasks that require iterative thinking and backtracking. Empirical results on this benchmark reveal that existing MLLMs exhibit significant performance deficits in long-chain reflective reasoning. To address this limitation, we generate post-training data and further explore learning paradigms for exploiting such data. We first develop the Step-Elicited Response Generation pipeline to create MM-HELIX-100K, a large-scale dataset of 100k high-quality, reflective reasoning traces for instruction-tuning stage. Given that standard Reinforcement Learning fails on complex tasks due to sparse reward signals and catastrophic forgetting after Supervised Fine-Tuning, we propose Adaptive Hybrid Policy Optimization (AHPO), a novel training strategy that dynamically unifies offline supervision and online optimization into a single stage. This strategy enables the model to learn from expert data when rewards are sparse and conduct independent exploration once proficient. When applied to the Qwen2.5-VL-7B baseline, our method achieves a +18.6\% accuracy improvement on MM-HELIX benchmark and demonstrates strong generalization with a +5.7\% average performance gain on general mathematic and logic tasks. Our work demonstrate that reflective reasoning in MLLMs can be effectively learned and generalized, paving the way for developing more capable MLLMs.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_08540
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle MM-HELIX: Boosting Multimodal Long-Chain Reflective Reasoning with Holistic Platform and Adaptive Hybrid Policy Optimization
Zhao, Xiangyu
Lin, Junming
Liang, Tianhao
Zhou, Yifan
Chai, Wenhao
Gu, Yuzhe
Wang, Weiyun
Chen, Kai
Luo, Gen
Zhang, Wenwei
Yan, Junchi
Yang, Hua
Duan, Haodong
Yang, Xue
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
While current Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated proficiency in reasoning tasks such as mathematics and logic, their capacity for long-chain reflective reasoning, a prerequisite for solving complex real-world problems, remains largely underexplored. In this work, we first conduct an extensive empirical investigation to evaluate this capability. Leveraging a carefully designed data synthesis engine, we construct MM-HELIX, a multimodal benchmark consisting 1,260 samples of 42 challenging synthetic tasks that require iterative thinking and backtracking. Empirical results on this benchmark reveal that existing MLLMs exhibit significant performance deficits in long-chain reflective reasoning. To address this limitation, we generate post-training data and further explore learning paradigms for exploiting such data. We first develop the Step-Elicited Response Generation pipeline to create MM-HELIX-100K, a large-scale dataset of 100k high-quality, reflective reasoning traces for instruction-tuning stage. Given that standard Reinforcement Learning fails on complex tasks due to sparse reward signals and catastrophic forgetting after Supervised Fine-Tuning, we propose Adaptive Hybrid Policy Optimization (AHPO), a novel training strategy that dynamically unifies offline supervision and online optimization into a single stage. This strategy enables the model to learn from expert data when rewards are sparse and conduct independent exploration once proficient. When applied to the Qwen2.5-VL-7B baseline, our method achieves a +18.6\% accuracy improvement on MM-HELIX benchmark and demonstrates strong generalization with a +5.7\% average performance gain on general mathematic and logic tasks. Our work demonstrate that reflective reasoning in MLLMs can be effectively learned and generalized, paving the way for developing more capable MLLMs.
title MM-HELIX: Boosting Multimodal Long-Chain Reflective Reasoning with Holistic Platform and Adaptive Hybrid Policy Optimization
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.08540