Daily Papers

Vision-Language Models have made significant progress on many perception-focused tasks, however, their progress on reasoning-focused tasks seem to be limited due to the lack of high-quality and diverse training data. In this work, we aim to address the scarcity issue of reasoning-focused multimodal datasets. We propose VisualWebInstruct - a novel approach that leverages search engine to create a diverse, and high-quality dataset spanning multiple disciplines like math, physics, finance, chemistry, etc. Starting with meticulously selected 30,000 seed images, we employ Google Image search to identify websites containing similar images. We collect and process the HTMLs from over 700K unique URL sources. Through a pipeline of content extraction, filtering and synthesis, we build a dataset of approximately 900K question-answer pairs, with 40% being visual QA pairs and the rest as text QA pairs. Models fine-tuned on VisualWebInstruct demonstrate significant performance gains: (1) training from Llava-OV-mid shows 10-20% absolute point gains across benchmarks, (2) training from MAmmoTH-VL shows 5% absoluate gain. Our best model MAmmoTH-VL2 shows state-of-the-art performance within the 10B parameter class on MMMU-Pro-std (40.7%), MathVerse (42.6%), and DynaMath (55.7%). These remarkable results highlight the effectiveness of our dataset in enhancing VLMs' reasoning capabilities for complex multimodal tasks.

This paper introduces MMMU-Pro, a robust version of the Massive Multi-discipline Multimodal Understanding and Reasoning (MMMU) benchmark. MMMU-Pro rigorously assesses multimodal models' true understanding and reasoning capabilities through a three-step process based on MMMU: (1) filtering out questions answerable by text-only models, (2) augmenting candidate options, and (3) introducing a vision-only input setting where questions are embedded within images. This setting challenges AI to truly "see" and "read" simultaneously, testing a fundamental human cognitive skill of seamlessly integrating visual and textual information. Results show that model performance is substantially lower on MMMU-Pro than on MMMU, ranging from 16.8% to 26.9% across models. We explore the impact of OCR prompts and Chain of Thought (CoT) reasoning, finding that OCR prompts have minimal effect while CoT generally improves performance. MMMU-Pro provides a more rigorous evaluation tool, closely mimicking real-world scenarios and offering valuable directions for future research in multimodal AI.

This paper introduces JMMMU-Pro, an image-based Japanese Multi-discipline Multimodal Understanding Benchmark, and Vibe Benchmark Construction, a scalable construction method. Following the evolution from MMMU to MMMU-Pro, JMMMU-Pro extends JMMMU by composing the question image and question text into a single image, thereby creating a benchmark that requires integrated visual-textual understanding through visual perception. To build JMMMU-Pro, we propose Vibe Benchmark Construction, a methodology in which an image generative model (e.g., Nano Banana Pro) produces candidate visual questions, and humans verify the outputs and, when necessary, regenerate with adjusted prompts to ensure quality. By leveraging Nano Banana Pro's highly realistic image generation capabilities and its ability to embed clean Japanese text, we construct a high-quality benchmark at low cost, covering a wide range of background and layout designs. Experimental results show that all open-source LMMs struggle substantially with JMMMU-Pro, underscoring JMMMU-Pro as an important benchmark for guiding future efforts in the open-source community. We believe that JMMMU-Pro provides a more rigorous evaluation tool for assessing the Japanese capabilities of LMMs and that our Vibe Benchmark Construction also offers an efficient guideline for future development of image-based VQA benchmarks.

Training vision-language models (VLMs) for complex reasoning remains a challenging task, i.a. due to the scarcity of high-quality image-text reasoning data. Conversely, text-based reasoning resources are abundant and scalable, but it is still an open question how to leveraging them for VLM reasoning. To address this problem, we propose VOLD, a framework to transfer reasoning capabilities from text-only teacher models to VLM student models. To this end, VOLD combines reinforcement learning via Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) with on-policy distillation, which allows the student reasoning traces to be guided by the teacher model, resulting in a significant gain over using GRPO alone. We further show that a cold-start alignment is essential for an effective transfer during the online training phase in this scenario and that without sufficient distributional alignment between teacher and student, on-policy distillation fails to provide meaningful guidance. We evaluate VOLD across diverse benchmarks including MMMU-Pro, MathVision, MathVista, and LogicVista, showing that VOLD outperforms the baseline model significantly and improves over the state of the art by a margin. Our ablation shows the importance of a cold-start alignment via SFT for on-policy distillation with a text-only teacher.

Recently, slow-thinking systems like GPT-o1 and DeepSeek-R1 have demonstrated great potential in solving challenging problems through explicit reflection. They significantly outperform the best fast-thinking models, such as GPT-4o, on various math and science benchmarks. However, their multimodal reasoning capabilities remain on par with fast-thinking models. For instance, GPT-o1's performance on benchmarks like MathVista, MathVerse, and MathVision is similar to fast-thinking models. In this paper, we aim to enhance the slow-thinking capabilities of vision-language models using reinforcement learning (without relying on distillation) to advance the state of the art. First, we adapt the GRPO algorithm with a novel technique called Selective Sample Replay (SSR) to address the vanishing advantages problem. While this approach yields strong performance, the resulting RL-trained models exhibit limited self-reflection or self-verification. To further encourage slow-thinking, we introduce Forced Rethinking, which appends a textual rethinking trigger to the end of initial rollouts in RL training, explicitly enforcing a self-reflection reasoning step. By combining these two techniques, our model, VL-Rethinker, advances state-of-the-art scores on MathVista, MathVerse, and MathVision to achieve 80.3%, 61.8%, and 43.9% respectively. VL-Rethinker also achieves open-source SoTA on multi-disciplinary benchmarks such as MMMU-Pro, EMMA, and MEGA-Bench, narrowing the gap with GPT-o1.

Vision-language generative reward models (VL-GenRMs) play a crucial role in aligning and evaluating multimodal AI systems, yet their own evaluation remains under-explored. Current assessment methods primarily rely on AI-annotated preference labels from traditional VL tasks, which can introduce biases and often fail to effectively challenge state-of-the-art models. To address these limitations, we introduce VL-RewardBench, a comprehensive benchmark spanning general multimodal queries, visual hallucination detection, and complex reasoning tasks. Through our AI-assisted annotation pipeline combining sample selection with human verification, we curate 1,250 high-quality examples specifically designed to probe model limitations. Comprehensive evaluation across 16 leading large vision-language models, demonstrates VL-RewardBench's effectiveness as a challenging testbed, where even GPT-4o achieves only 65.4% accuracy, and state-of-the-art open-source models such as Qwen2-VL-72B, struggle to surpass random-guessing. Importantly, performance on VL-RewardBench strongly correlates (Pearson's r > 0.9) with MMMU-Pro accuracy using Best-of-N sampling with VL-GenRMs. Analysis experiments uncover three critical insights for improving VL-GenRMs: (i) models predominantly fail at basic visual perception tasks rather than reasoning tasks; (ii) inference-time scaling benefits vary dramatically by model capacity; and (iii) training VL-GenRMs to learn to judge substantially boosts judgment capability (+14.7% accuracy for a 7B VL-GenRM). We believe VL-RewardBench along with the experimental insights will become a valuable resource for advancing VL-GenRMs.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown promising capabilities in reasoning tasks, yet still struggle with complex problems requiring explicit self-reflection and self-correction, especially compared to their unimodal text-based counterparts. Existing reflection methods are simplistic and struggle to generate meaningful and instructive feedback, as the reasoning ability and knowledge limits of pre-trained models are largely fixed during initial training. To overcome these challenges, we propose Multimodal Self-Reflection enhanced reasoning with Group Relative Policy Optimization (SRPO), a two-stage reflection-aware reinforcement learning (RL) framework explicitly designed to enhance multimodal LLM reasoning. In the first stage, we construct a high-quality, reflection-focused dataset under the guidance of an advanced MLLM, which generates reflections based on initial responses to help the policy model learn both reasoning and self-reflection. In the second stage, we introduce a novel reward mechanism within the GRPO framework that encourages concise and cognitively meaningful reflection while avoiding redundancy. Extensive experiments across multiple multimodal reasoning benchmarks, including MathVista, MathVision, MathVerse, and MMMU-Pro, using Qwen-2.5-VL-7B and Qwen-2.5-VL-32B demonstrate that SRPO significantly outperforms state-of-the-art models, achieving notable improvements in both reasoning accuracy and reflection quality.

Open-source multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown significant potential in a broad range of multimodal tasks. However, their reasoning capabilities remain constrained by existing instruction-tuning datasets, which were predominately repurposed from academic datasets such as VQA, AI2D, and ChartQA. These datasets target simplistic tasks, and only provide phrase-level answers without any intermediate rationales. To address these challenges, we introduce a scalable and cost-effective method to construct a large-scale multimodal instruction-tuning dataset with rich intermediate rationales designed to elicit CoT reasoning. Using only open models, we create a dataset containing 12M instruction-response pairs to cover diverse, reasoning-intensive tasks with detailed and faithful rationales. Experiments demonstrate that training MLLMs on this dataset significantly improves reasoning capabilities, achieving state-of-the-art performance on benchmarks such as MathVerse (+8.1%), MMMU-Pro (+7%), and MuirBench (+13.3%). Additionally, the model demonstrates notable improvements of up to 4% on non-reasoning-based benchmarks. Ablation studies further highlight the importance of key components, such as rewriting and self-filtering, in the dataset construction process.

In recent multimodal research, the diffusion paradigm has emerged as a promising alternative to the autoregressive paradigm (AR), owing to its unique decoding advantages. However, due to the capability limitations of the base diffusion language model, the performance of the diffusion vision language model (dVLM) still lags significantly behind that of mainstream models. This leads to a simple yet fundamental question: Is it possible to construct dVLMs based on existing powerful AR models? In response, we propose DiffusionVL, a dVLM family that could be translated from any powerful AR models. Through simple fine-tuning, we successfully adapt AR pre-trained models into the diffusion paradigm. This approach yields two key observations: (1) The paradigm shift from AR-based multimodal models to diffusion is remarkably effective. (2) Direct conversion of an AR language model to a dVLM is also feasible, achieving performance competitive with LLaVA-style visual-instruction-tuning. Further, we introduce a block-decoding design into dVLMs that supports arbitrary-length generation and KV cache reuse, achieving a significant inference speedup. We conduct a large number of experiments. Despite training with less than 5% of the data required by prior methods, DiffusionVL achieves a comprehensive performance improvement-a 34.4% gain on the MMMU-Pro (vision) bench and 37.5% gain on the MME (Cog.) bench-alongside a 2x inference speedup. The model and code are released at https://github.com/hustvl/DiffusionVL.

Existing benchmarks do not test Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) on their interactive intelligence with human users which is vital for developing general-purpose AI assistants. We design InterFeedback, an interactive framework, which can be applied to any LMM and dataset to assess this ability autonomously. On top of this, we introduce InterFeedback-Bench which evaluates interactive intelligence using two representative datasets, MMMU-Pro and MathVerse, to test 10 different open-source LMMs. Additionally, we present InterFeedback-Human, a newly collected dataset of 120 cases designed for manually testing interactive performance in leading models such as OpenAI-o1 and Claude-3.5-Sonnet. Our evaluation results show that even state-of-the-art LMM (like OpenAI-o1) can correct their results through human feedback less than 50%. Our findings point to the need for methods that can enhance the LMMs' capability to interpret and benefit from feedback.

We open-source MiMo-VL-Miloco-7B and its quantized variant MiMo-VL-Miloco-7B-GGUF, a pair of home-centric vision-language models that achieve strong performance on both home-scenario understanding and general multimodal reasoning. Built on the MiMo-VL-7B backbone, MiMo-VL-Miloco-7B is specialized for smart-home environments, attaining leading F1 scores on gesture recognition and common home-scenario understanding, while also delivering consistent gains across video benchmarks such as Video-MME, Video-MMMU, and Charades-STA, as well as language understanding benchmarks including MMMU-Pro and MMLU-Pro. In our experiments, MiMo-VL-Miloco-7B outperforms strong closed-source and open-source baselines on home-scenario understanding and several multimodal reasoning benchmarks. To balance specialization and generality, we design a two-stage training pipeline that combines supervised fine-tuning with reinforcement learning based on Group Relative Policy Optimization, leveraging efficient multi-domain data. We further incorporate chain-of-thought supervision and token-budget-aware reasoning, enabling the model to learn knowledge in a data-efficient manner while also performing reasoning efficiently. Our analysis shows that targeted home-scenario training not only enhances activity and gesture understanding, but also improves text-only reasoning with only modest trade-offs on document-centric tasks. Model checkpoints, quantized GGUF weights, and our home-scenario evaluation toolkit are publicly available at https://github.com/XiaoMi/xiaomi-mimo-vl-miloco to support research and deployment in real-world smart-home applications.