Semi-off-Policy Reinforcement Learning for Vision-Language Slow-thinking
  Reasoning
Authors: name: Junhao Shen; name: Haiteng Zhao; name: Yuzhe Gu; name: Songyang Gao; name: Kuikun Liu; name: Haian Huang; name: Jianfei Gao; name: Dahua Lin; name: Wenwei Zhang; name: Kai Chen
Published: 2025-07-22 17:59:34

Abstract: Enhancing large vision-language models (LVLMs) with visual slow-thinking
reasoning is crucial for solving complex multimodal tasks. However, since LVLMs
are mainly trained with vision-language alignment, it is difficult to adopt
on-policy reinforcement learning (RL) to develop the slow thinking ability
because the rollout space is restricted by its initial abilities. Off-policy RL
offers a way to go beyond the current policy, but directly distilling
trajectories from external models may cause visual hallucinations due to
mismatched visual perception abilities across models. To address these issues,
this paper proposes SOPHIA, a simple and scalable Semi-Off-Policy RL for
vision-language slow-tHInking reAsoning. SOPHIA builds a semi-off-policy
behavior model by combining on-policy visual understanding from a trainable
LVLM with off-policy slow-thinking reasoning from a language model, assigns
outcome-based rewards to reasoning, and propagates visual rewards backward.
Then LVLM learns slow-thinking reasoning ability from the obtained reasoning
trajectories using propagated rewards via off-policy RL algorithms. Extensive
experiments with InternVL2.5 and InternVL3.0 with 8B and 38B sizes show the
effectiveness of SOPHIA. Notably, SOPHIA improves InternVL3.0-38B by 8.50% in
average, reaching state-of-the-art performance among open-source LVLMs on
multiple multimodal reasoning benchmarks, and even outperforms some
closed-source models (e.g., GPT-4.1) on the challenging MathVision and
OlympiadBench, achieving 49.08% and 49.95% pass@1 accuracy, respectively.
Analysis shows SOPHIA outperforms supervised fine-tuning and direct on-policy
RL methods, offering a better policy initialization for further on-policy
training.