Play to Generalize: Learning to Reason Through Game Play
Authors: name: Yunfei Xie; name: Yinsong Ma; name: Shiyi Lan; name: Alan Yuille; name: Junfei Xiao; name: Chen Wei
Published: 2025-06-09 17:59:57

Abstract: Developing generalizable reasoning capabilities in multimodal large language
models (MLLMs) remains challenging. Motivated by cognitive science literature
suggesting that gameplay promotes transferable cognitive skills, we propose a
novel post-training paradigm, Visual Game Learning, or ViGaL, where MLLMs
develop out-of-domain generalization of multimodal reasoning through playing
arcade-like games. Specifically, we show that post-training a 7B-parameter MLLM
via reinforcement learning (RL) on simple arcade-like games, e.g. Snake,
significantly enhances its downstream performance on multimodal math benchmarks
like MathVista, and on multi-discipline questions like MMMU, without seeing any
worked solutions, equations, or diagrams during RL, suggesting the capture of
transferable reasoning skills. Remarkably, our model outperforms specialist
models tuned on multimodal reasoning data in multimodal reasoning benchmarks,
while preserving the base model's performance on general visual benchmarks, a
challenge where specialist models often fall short. Our findings suggest a new
post-training paradigm: synthetic, rule-based games can serve as controllable
and scalable pre-text tasks that unlock generalizable multimodal reasoning
abilities in MLLMs.