Will Pre-Training Ever End? A First Step Toward Next-Generation Foundation MLLMs via Self-Improving Systematic Cognition

Recent progress in (multimodal) large language models ((M)LLMs) has shifted focus from pre-training to inference-time computation and post-training optimization, largely due to concerns over the availability of high-quality human data. However, these strategies alone are insufficient to drive substantial model improvements. We argue that effective model advancement requires strong synergy among pre-training, inference-time computation, and post-training optimization. In this paper, we introduce Self-Improving cognition (SIcog), a self-learning framework for constructing next-generation foundation MLLMs by imparting multimodal knowledge and enhancing systematic cognitive capabilities through multimodal pre-training with self-generated data. Specifically, we propose Chain-of-Description for step-by-step visual understanding and integrate structured Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning to support in-depth multimodal reasoning. SIcog first equips a base model with systematic perception and reasoning using minimal external supervision. The enhanced models then generate candidate image captions and CoT reasoning responses for unlabeled images and image-question pairs across diverse tasks, which are filtered through a semantic-similarity-guided self-consistency mechanism. These high-quality, self-generated samples enable large-scale multimodal pre-training, creating a self-improvement loop. Experiments demonstrate SIcog's effectiveness in developing MLLMs with enhanced multimodal cognition. Using only 213K self-generated pre-training samples, SIcog achieves significant improvements, including +3.6% on MMStar and +3.5% on AI2D, outperforming previous pre-training approaches. When combined with post-training techniques for CoT reasoning, SIcog yields +9% gains on MMVet and +8.5% on ScienceQA.