Title: BaseReward: A Strong Baseline for Multimodal Reward Model
Primary area: applications to computer vision, audio, language, and other modalities
Keywords: Multimodal Large Language Models, Reward Models, Human Preference Alignment, Reinforcement Learning

Abstract: The rapid advancement of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) has made aligning them with human preferences a critical challenge. Reward Models (RMs) are a core technology for achieving this goal, but a systematic guide for building state-of-the-art Multimodal Reward Models (MRMs) is currently lacking in both academia and industry. Through exhaustive experimental analysis, this paper aims to provide a clear “recipe” for constructing high-performance MRMs. We systematically investigate every crucial component in the MRM development pipeline, including reward modeling paradigms (e.g., Naive-RM, Critic-based RM, and Generative RM), reward head architecture, training strategies, data curation (covering over ten multimodal and text-only preference datasets), backbone model and model scale, and ensemble methods.

Based on these experimental insights, we introduce BaseReward, a powerful and efficient baseline for multimodal reward modeling. BaseReward adopts a simple yet effective architecture, built upon a Qwen2.5-VL backbone, featuring an optimized two-layer reward head, and is trained on a carefully curated mixture of high-quality multimodal and text-only preference data. Our results show that BaseReward establishes a new state-of-the-art (SOTA) on major benchmarks such as MM-RLHF-Reward Bench, VL-Reward Bench, and Multimodal Reward Bench, outperforming previous open-source and proprietary models. Furthermore, to validate its practical utility beyond static benchmarks, we integrate BaseReward into a real-world reinforcement learning pipeline, successfully enhancing an MLLM’s performance across various perception, reasoning, and conversational tasks. This work not only delivers a top-tier MRM but, more importantly, provides the community with a clear, empirically backed guide for developing robust reward models for the next generation of MLLMs.

TL;DR: This paper provides a systematic "recipe" for building state-of-the-art Multimodal Reward Models (MRMs) through exhaustive experimental analysis, and introduces BaseReward, a new SOTA model that outperforms existing approaches on major benchmarks.