Visionary-R1: Mitigating Shortcuts in Visual Reasoning with
  Reinforcement Learning
Authors: name: Jiaer Xia; name: Yuhang Zang; name: Peng Gao; name: Yixuan Li; name: Kaiyang Zhou
Published: 2025-05-20 17:58:35

Abstract: Learning general-purpose reasoning capabilities has long been a challenging
problem in AI. Recent research in large language models (LLMs), such as
DeepSeek-R1, has shown that reinforcement learning techniques like GRPO can
enable pre-trained LLMs to develop reasoning capabilities using simple
question-answer pairs. In this paper, we aim to train visual language models
(VLMs) to perform reasoning on image data through reinforcement learning and
visual question-answer pairs, without any explicit chain-of-thought (CoT)
supervision. Our findings indicate that simply applying reinforcement learning
to a VLM -- by prompting the model to produce a reasoning chain before
providing an answer -- can lead the model to develop shortcuts from easy
questions, thereby reducing its ability to generalize across unseen data
distributions. We argue that the key to mitigating shortcut learning is to
encourage the model to interpret images prior to reasoning. Therefore, we train
the model to adhere to a caption-reason-answer output format: initially
generating a detailed caption for an image, followed by constructing an
extensive reasoning chain. When trained on 273K CoT-free visual question-answer
pairs and using only reinforcement learning, our model, named Visionary-R1,
outperforms strong multimodal models, such as GPT-4o, Claude3.5-Sonnet, and
Gemini-1.5-Pro, on multiple visual reasoning benchmarks.