Vision-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in Multimodal Large Language Models
This work addresses the problem of limited reasoning in MLLMs for AI researchers, offering an incremental advancement by building on existing RL methods and datasets.
The paper tackles the challenge of enhancing reasoning capabilities in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) by proposing Vision-R1, which constructs a 200K multimodal chain-of-thought dataset without human annotations and uses progressive training strategies, resulting in an average improvement of ~6% on multimodal math reasoning benchmarks and achieving 73.5% accuracy on MathVista.
DeepSeek-R1-Zero has successfully demonstrated the emergence of reasoning capabilities in LLMs purely through Reinforcement Learning (RL). Inspired by this breakthrough, we explore how RL can be utilized to enhance the reasoning capability of MLLMs. However, direct training with RL struggles to activate complex reasoning capabilities such as questioning and reflection in MLLMs, due to the absence of substantial high-quality multimodal reasoning data. To address this issue, we propose the reasoning MLLM, Vision-R1, to improve multimodal reasoning capability. Specifically, we first construct a high-quality multimodal CoT dataset without human annotations by leveraging an existing MLLM and DeepSeek-R1 through modality bridging and data filtering to obtain a 200K multimodal CoT dataset, Vision-R1-cold dataset. It serves as cold-start initialization data for Vision-R1. To mitigate the optimization challenges caused by overthinking after cold start, we propose Progressive Thinking Suppression Training (PTST) strategy and employ Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) with the hard formatting result reward function to gradually refine the model's ability to learn correct and complex reasoning processes on a 10K multimodal math dataset. Comprehensive experiments show our model achieves an average improvement of $\sim$6% across various multimodal math reasoning benchmarks. Vision-R1-7B achieves a 73.5% accuracy on the widely used MathVista benchmark, which is only 0.4% lower than the leading reasoning model, OpenAI O1. The datasets and code will be released in: https://github.com/Osilly/Vision-R1 .