# Visual-RFT: Visual Reinforcement Fine-Tuning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.01785 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.01785/

## Key facts

- Cited by 513 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Multimodal reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 46 of its 58 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Mar 2025.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Multimodal reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/lr/multimodal-reasoning/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 46)

- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03300/) (2024)
- [ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03629/) (2022)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [Qwen2-VL: Enhancing Vision-Language Model's Perception of the World at Any Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12191/) (2024)
- [Grounding DINO: Marrying DINO with Grounded Pre-Training for Open-Set Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05499/) (2023)
- [LLaVA-OneVision: Easy Visual Task Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03326/) (2024)
- [Learning to Prompt for Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01134/) (2021)
- [Fine-Tuning Language Models from Human Preferences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.08593/) (2019)
- [Fine-Grained Visual Classification of Aircraft](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1306.5151/) (2013)
- [Conditional Prompt Learning for Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05557/) (2022)
- [LVIS: A Dataset for Large Vocabulary Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.03195/) (2019)
- [Kimi k1.5: Scaling Reinforcement Learning with LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12599/) (2025)
- [Qwen2.5-Coder Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12186/) (2024)
- [Qwen2.5-Math Technical Report: Toward Mathematical Expert Model via Self-Improvement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12122/) (2024)
- [Tulu 3: Pushing Frontiers in Open Language Model Post-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15124/) (2024)
- [LISA: Reasoning Segmentation via Large Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.00692/) (2023)
- [Aligning Large Multimodal Models with Factually Augmented RLHF](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.14525/) (2023)
- [MaPLe: Multi-modal Prompt Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03117/) (2022)
- [Detecting Twenty-thousand Classes using Image-level Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.02605/) (2022)
- [Open-Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation with Mask-adapted CLIP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.04150/) (2022)
- [GLaMM: Pixel Grounding Large Multimodal Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.03356/) (2023)
- [Open-Vocabulary Object Detection Using Captions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10678/) (2020)
- [RLHF-V: Towards Trustworthy MLLMs via Behavior Alignment from Fine-grained Correctional Human Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00849/) (2023)
- [InternLM2 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17297/) (2024)
- [Skywork-Reward: Bag of Tricks for Reward Modeling in LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.18451/) (2024)
- [Generalized Decoding for Pixel, Image, and Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.11270/) (2022)
- [Self-regulating Prompts: Foundational Model Adaptation without Forgetting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.06948/) (2023)
- [ArCHer: Training Language Model Agents via Hierarchical Multi-Turn RL](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.19446/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 513)

- [VLM-R1: A Stable and Generalizable R1-style Large Vision-Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.07615/) (2025)
- [DeepEyes: Incentivizing "Thinking with Images" via Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.14362/) (2025)
- [Towards Reasoning Era: A Survey of Long Chain-of-Thought for Reasoning Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.09567/) (2025)
- [VideoChat-R1: Enhancing Spatio-Temporal Perception via Reinforcement Fine-Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.06958/) (2025)
- [GUI-R1 : A Generalist R1-Style Vision-Language Action Model For GUI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.10458/) (2025)
- [SFT or RL? An Early Investigation into Training R1-Like Reasoning Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.11468/) (2025)
- [The Landscape of Agentic Reinforcement Learning for LLMs: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.02547/) (2025)
- [A Survey of Reinforcement Learning for Large Reasoning Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.08827/) (2025)
- [UI-R1: Enhancing Efficient Action Prediction of GUI Agents by Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.21620/) (2025)
- [Cosmos-Reason1: From Physical Common Sense To Embodied Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.15558/) (2025)
- [SpaceR: Reinforcing MLLMs in Video Spatial Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.01805/) (2025)
- [ThinkAct: Vision-Language-Action Reasoning via Reinforced Visual Latent Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.16815/) (2025)
- [GPG: A Simple and Strong Reinforcement Learning Baseline for Model Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.02546/) (2025)
- [Time-R1: Post-Training Large Vision Language Model for Temporal Video Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.13377/) (2025)
- [A Survey of Efficient Reasoning for Large Reasoning Models: Language, Multimodality, and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.21614/) (2025)
- [OpenVLThinker: Complex Vision-Language Reasoning via Iterative SFT-RL Cycles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.17352/) (2025)
- [Perception-R1: Pioneering Perception Policy with Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.07954/) (2025)
- [Mini-o3: Scaling Up Reasoning Patterns and Interaction Turns for Visual Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.07969/) (2025)
- [VisuLogic: A Benchmark for Evaluating Visual Reasoning in Multi-modal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.15279/) (2025)
- [Latent Visual Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.24251/) (2025)
- [Perception-Aware Policy Optimization for Multimodal Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.06448/) (2025)
- [Q-Insight: Understanding Image Quality via Visual Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.22679/) (2025)
- [A Sober Look at Progress in Language Model Reasoning: Pitfalls and Paths to Reproducibility](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.07086/) (2025)
- [VideoRFT: Incentivizing Video Reasoning Capability in MLLMs via Reinforced Fine-Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.12434/) (2025)
- [Thinking With Videos: Multimodal Tool-Augmented Reinforcement Learning for Long Video Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.04416/) (2025)
- [Unified Multimodal Chain-of-Thought Reward Model through Reinforcement Fine-Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.03318/) (2025)
- [Perception, Reason, Think, and Plan: A Survey on Large Multimodal Reasoning Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.04921/) (2025)
- [SpatialLadder: Progressive Training for Spatial Reasoning in Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.08531/) (2025)
- [Visionary-R1: Mitigating Shortcuts in Visual Reasoning with Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.14677/) (2025)
- [NoisyRollout: Reinforcing Visual Reasoning with Data Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.13055/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Reinforcement Fine-Tuning (RFT) in Large Reasoning Models like OpenAI o1 learns from feedback on its answers, which is especially useful in applications when fine-tuning data is scarce. Recent open-source work like DeepSeek-R1 demonstrates that reinforcement learning with verifiable reward is one key direction in reproducing o1. While the R1-style model has demonstrated success in language models, its application in multi-modal domains remains under-explored. This work introduces Visual Reinforcement Fine-Tuning (Visual-RFT), which further extends the application areas of RFT on visual tasks. Specifically, Visual-RFT first uses Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) to generate multiple responses containing reasoning tokens and final answers for each input, and then uses our proposed visual perception verifiable reward functions to update the model via the policy optimization algorithm such as Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). We design different verifiable reward functions for different perception tasks, such as the Intersection over Union (IoU) reward for object detection. Experimental results on fine-grained image classification, few-shot object detection, reasoning grounding, as well as open-vocabulary object detection benchmarks show the competitive performance and advanced generalization ability of Visual-RFT compared with Supervised Fine-tuning (SFT). For example, Visual-RFT improves accuracy by 24.3% over the baseline in one-shot fine-grained image classification with around 100 samples. In few-shot object detection, Visual-RFT also exceeds the baseline by 21.9 on COCO's two-shot setting and 15.4 on LVIS. Our Visual-RFT represents a paradigm shift in fine-tuning LVLMs, offering a data-efficient, reward-driven approach that enhances reasoning and adaptability for domain-specific tasks.