VL-Rethinker: Incentivizing Self-Reflection of Vision-Language Models
  with Reinforcement Learning
Authors: name: Haozhe Wang; name: Chao Qu; name: Zuming Huang; name: Wei Chu; name: Fangzhen Lin; name: Wenhu Chen
Published: 2025-04-10 17:41:56

Abstract: 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.