# GMAI-VL-R1: Harnessing Reinforcement Learning for Multimodal Medical Reasoning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.01886 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.01886/

## Key facts

- Cited by 41 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Clinical and biomedical applications, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Apr 2025.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Clinical and biomedical applications](https://mlsanity.com/lr/clinical-and-biomedical-applications/)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 41)

- [From AI for Science to Agentic Science: A Survey on Autonomous Scientific Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.14111/) (2025)
- [A Survey of Agentic Reasoning for Large Language Models: Towards Recursively Self-Improving and Collective Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.12538/) (2026)
- [MMedAgent-RL: Optimizing Multi-Agent Collaboration for Multimodal Medical Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.00555/) (2025)
- [A Survey of Scientific Large Language Models: From Data Foundations to Agent Frontiers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.21148/) (2025)
- [X-Reasoner: Towards Generalizable Reasoning Across Modalities and Domains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.03981/) (2025)
- [MedVLThinker: Simple Baselines for Multimodal Medical Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.02669/) (2025)
- [Chiron-o1: Igniting Multimodal Large Language Models towards Generalizable Medical Reasoning via Mentor-Intern Collaborative Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.16962/) (2025)
- [PyVision-RL: Forging Open Agentic Vision Models via RL](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.20739/) (2026)
- [Training LLMs for EHR-Based Reasoning Tasks via Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.24105/) (2025)
- [UniMedVL: Unifying Medical Multimodal Understanding and Generation through Observation-Knowledge-Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.15710/) (2025)
- [MedSynapse-V: Bridging Visual Perception and Clinical Intuition via Latent Memory Evolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.26283/) (2026)
- [SciReasoner: Laying the Scientific Reasoning Ground Across Disciplines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.21320/) (2025)
- [OralGPT-Omni: A Versatile Dental Multimodal Large Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.22055/) (2025)
- [Medical Reasoning in the Era of LLMs: A Systematic Review of Enhancement Techniques and Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.00669/) (2025)
- [Ophiuchus: Incentivizing Tool-augmented "Think with Images" for Joint Medical Segmentation, Understanding and Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.14157/) (2025)
- [MedQ-Bench: Evaluating and Exploring Medical Image Quality Assessment Abilities in MLLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.01691/) (2025)
- [ShizhenGPT: Towards Multimodal LLMs for Traditional Chinese Medicine](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.14706/) (2025)
- [Elicit and Enhance: Advancing Multimodal Reasoning in Medical Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.23118/) (2025)
- [Bridging the Gap in Ophthalmic AI: MM-Retinal-Reason Dataset and OphthaReason Model toward Dynamic Multimodal Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.16129/) (2025)
- [3DReasonKnee: Advancing Grounded Reasoning in Medical Vision Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.20967/) (2025)
- [DentalGPT: Incentivizing Multimodal Complex Reasoning in Dentistry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.11558/) (2025)
- [Omni-MMSI: Toward Identity-attributed Social Interaction Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.00267/) (2026)
- [Retro-Expert: Collaborative Reasoning for Interpretable Retrosynthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10967/) (2025)
- [MMedExpert-R1: Strengthening Multimodal Medical Reasoning via Domain-Specific Adaptation and Clinical Guideline Reinforcement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.10949/) (2026)
- [ClinFusion: A Vision-Centric Multimodal LLM System for Holistic Medical Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.24743/) (2026)
- [InfiMed: Low-Resource Medical MLLMs with Advancing Understanding and Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.23867/) (2025)
- [Proactive Reasoning-with-Retrieval Framework for Medical Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.18303/) (2025)
- [Synthesizing High-Quality Visual Question Answering from Medical Documents with Generator-Verifier LMMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.25867/) (2025)
- [Project Imaging-X: A Survey of 1000+ Open-Access Medical Imaging Datasets for Foundation Model Development](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.27460/) (2026)
- [Breaking Failure Cascades: Step-Aware Reinforcement Learning for Medical Multimodal Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.31825/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent advances in general medical AI have made significant strides, but existing models often lack the reasoning capabilities needed for complex medical decision-making. This paper presents GMAI-VL-R1, a multimodal medical reasoning model enhanced by reinforcement learning (RL) to improve its reasoning abilities. Through iterative training, GMAI-VL-R1 optimizes decision-making, significantly boosting diagnostic accuracy and clinical support. We also develop a reasoning data synthesis method, generating step-by-step reasoning data via rejection sampling, which further enhances the model's generalization. Experimental results show that after RL training, GMAI-VL-R1 excels in tasks such as medical image diagnosis and visual question answering. While the model demonstrates basic memorization with supervised fine-tuning, RL is crucial for true generalization. Our work establishes new evaluation benchmarks and paves the way for future advancements in medical reasoning models. Code, data, and model will be released at hrefhttps://github.com/uni-medical/GMAI-VL-R1this link.