Training Multimodal Large Reasoning Models Needs Better Thoughts: A Three-Stage Framework for Long Chain-of-Thought Synthesis and Selection

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Wang, Yizhi, Yue, Linan, Zhang, Min-Ling
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866918337550745600
author Wang, Yizhi
Yue, Linan
Zhang, Min-Ling
author_facet Wang, Yizhi
Yue, Linan
Zhang, Min-Ling
contents Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance on complex reasoning tasks through long Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning. Extending these successes to multimodal reasoning remains challenging due to the increased complexity of integrating diverse input modalities and the scarcity of high-quality long CoT training data. Existing multimodal datasets and CoT synthesis methods still suffer from limited reasoning depth, modality conversion errors, and rigid generation pipelines, hindering model performance and stability. To this end, in this paper, we propose SynSelect, a novel three-stage Synthesis-Selection framework for generating high-quality long CoT data tailored to multimodal reasoning tasks. Specifically, SynSelect first leverages multiple heterogeneous multimodal LRMs to produce diverse candidate CoTs, and then applies both instance and batch level selection to filter high-quality CoTs that can effectively enhance the model's reasoning capabilities. Extensive experiments on multiple multimodal benchmarks demonstrate that models supervised fine-tuned on SynSelect-generated data significantly outperform baselines and achieve further improvements after reinforcement learning post-training. Our results validate SynSelect as an effective approach for advancing multimodal LRMs reasoning capabilities.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_18956
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Training Multimodal Large Reasoning Models Needs Better Thoughts: A Three-Stage Framework for Long Chain-of-Thought Synthesis and Selection
Wang, Yizhi
Yue, Linan
Zhang, Min-Ling
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance on complex reasoning tasks through long Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning. Extending these successes to multimodal reasoning remains challenging due to the increased complexity of integrating diverse input modalities and the scarcity of high-quality long CoT training data. Existing multimodal datasets and CoT synthesis methods still suffer from limited reasoning depth, modality conversion errors, and rigid generation pipelines, hindering model performance and stability. To this end, in this paper, we propose SynSelect, a novel three-stage Synthesis-Selection framework for generating high-quality long CoT data tailored to multimodal reasoning tasks. Specifically, SynSelect first leverages multiple heterogeneous multimodal LRMs to produce diverse candidate CoTs, and then applies both instance and batch level selection to filter high-quality CoTs that can effectively enhance the model's reasoning capabilities. Extensive experiments on multiple multimodal benchmarks demonstrate that models supervised fine-tuned on SynSelect-generated data significantly outperform baselines and achieve further improvements after reinforcement learning post-training. Our results validate SynSelect as an effective approach for advancing multimodal LRMs reasoning capabilities.
title Training Multimodal Large Reasoning Models Needs Better Thoughts: A Three-Stage Framework for Long Chain-of-Thought Synthesis and Selection
topic Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.18956