S1-VL: Scientific Multimodal Reasoning Model with Thinking-with-Images

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Main Authors: Li, Qingxiao, Xu, Lifeng, Wang, QingLi, Bai, Yudong, Ou, Mingwei, Hu, Shu, Xu, Nan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Li, Qingxiao
Xu, Lifeng
Wang, QingLi
Bai, Yudong
Ou, Mingwei
Hu, Shu
Xu, Nan
author_facet Li, Qingxiao
Xu, Lifeng
Wang, QingLi
Bai, Yudong
Ou, Mingwei
Hu, Shu
Xu, Nan
contents We present S1-VL, a multimodal reasoning model for scientific domains that natively supports two complementary reasoning paradigms: Scientific Reasoning, which relies on structured chain-of-thought, and Thinking-with-Images, which enables the model to actively manipulate images through Python code execution during reasoning. In the Thinking-with-Images mode, the model generates and executes image-processing code in a sandbox environment, obtains intermediate visual results, and continues reasoning in a multi-turn iterative manner. This design is particularly effective for challenging scenarios such as high-resolution scientific chart interpretation, microscopic image understanding, and geometry-assisted reasoning. To construct the training data, we collect scientific multimodal datasets spanning six disciplines: mathematics, physics, chemistry, astronomy, geography, and biology. We further develop a six-dimensional quality filtering framework for reasoning trajectories. To mitigate redundant, ineffective, and erroneous visual operations commonly found in existing datasets, we propose a multi-stage filtering pipeline together with an adaptive data routing strategy. This strategy converts samples with low visual information gain into pure Reasoning-mode data, enabling the model to learn when image operations are truly necessary. S1-VL is trained through a four-stage progressive pipeline: scientific multimodal SFT, Thinking-with-Images cold-start SFT, and two stages of reinforcement learning with SAPO. We build S1-VL-32B on top of Qwen3-VL-32B-Thinking and evaluate it on 13 benchmarks. Experimental results show that S1-VL-32B achieves state-of-the-art performance on all five Thinking-with-Images benchmarks, including HRBench-4K, HRBench-8K, MME-RealWorld-CN, MME-RealWorld-Lite, and V*, and outperforms compared systems on scientific reasoning benchmarks such as Physics and VRSBench.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_21409
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle S1-VL: Scientific Multimodal Reasoning Model with Thinking-with-Images
Li, Qingxiao
Xu, Lifeng
Wang, QingLi
Bai, Yudong
Ou, Mingwei
Hu, Shu
Xu, Nan
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
We present S1-VL, a multimodal reasoning model for scientific domains that natively supports two complementary reasoning paradigms: Scientific Reasoning, which relies on structured chain-of-thought, and Thinking-with-Images, which enables the model to actively manipulate images through Python code execution during reasoning. In the Thinking-with-Images mode, the model generates and executes image-processing code in a sandbox environment, obtains intermediate visual results, and continues reasoning in a multi-turn iterative manner. This design is particularly effective for challenging scenarios such as high-resolution scientific chart interpretation, microscopic image understanding, and geometry-assisted reasoning. To construct the training data, we collect scientific multimodal datasets spanning six disciplines: mathematics, physics, chemistry, astronomy, geography, and biology. We further develop a six-dimensional quality filtering framework for reasoning trajectories. To mitigate redundant, ineffective, and erroneous visual operations commonly found in existing datasets, we propose a multi-stage filtering pipeline together with an adaptive data routing strategy. This strategy converts samples with low visual information gain into pure Reasoning-mode data, enabling the model to learn when image operations are truly necessary. S1-VL is trained through a four-stage progressive pipeline: scientific multimodal SFT, Thinking-with-Images cold-start SFT, and two stages of reinforcement learning with SAPO. We build S1-VL-32B on top of Qwen3-VL-32B-Thinking and evaluate it on 13 benchmarks. Experimental results show that S1-VL-32B achieves state-of-the-art performance on all five Thinking-with-Images benchmarks, including HRBench-4K, HRBench-8K, MME-RealWorld-CN, MME-RealWorld-Lite, and V*, and outperforms compared systems on scientific reasoning benchmarks such as Physics and VRSBench.
title S1-VL: Scientific Multimodal Reasoning Model with Thinking-with-Images
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.21409