# MindOmni: Unleashing Reasoning Generation in Vision Language Models with RGPO

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.13031 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.13031/

## Key facts

- Cited by 30 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Multimodal reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 49 of its 85 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 May 2025.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Multimodal reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/lr/multimodal-reasoning/)
- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [VLM benchmarks and visual reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/vlm-benchmarks-and-visual-reasoning/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 49)

- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03300/) (2024)
- [DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12948/) (2025)
- [Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09748/) (2022)
- [Self-Consistency Improves Chain of Thought Reasoning in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11171/) (2022)
- [Qwen2.5-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13923/) (2025)
- [SDXL: Improving Latent Diffusion Models for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.01952/) (2023)
- [LLaVA-OneVision: Easy Visual Task Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03326/) (2024)
- [MMBench: Is Your Multi-modal Model an All-around Player?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.06281/) (2023)
- [MMMU: A Massive Multi-discipline Multimodal Understanding and Reasoning Benchmark for Expert AGI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16502/) (2023)
- [How Far Are We to GPT-4V? Closing the Gap to Commercial Multimodal Models with Open-Source Suites](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16821/) (2024)
- [GenEval: An Object-Focused Framework for Evaluating Text-to-Image Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.11513/) (2023)
- [Chameleon: Mixed-Modal Early-Fusion Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.09818/) (2024)
- [Janus-Pro: Unified Multimodal Understanding and Generation with Data and Model Scaling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.17811/) (2025)
- [Emu3: Next-Token Prediction is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.18869/) (2024)
- [Autoregressive Model Beats Diffusion: Llama for Scalable Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.06525/) (2024)
- [Show-o: One Single Transformer to Unify Multimodal Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.12528/) (2024)
- [Transfusion: Predict the Next Token and Diffuse Images with One Multi-Modal Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.11039/) (2024)
- [ELLA: Equip Diffusion Models with LLM for Enhanced Semantic Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05135/) (2024)
- [Janus: Decoupling Visual Encoding for Unified Multimodal Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.13848/) (2024)
- [LLaVA-CoT: Let Vision Language Models Reason Step-by-Step](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.10440/) (2024)
- [Generative Multimodal Models are In-Context Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.13286/) (2023)
- [Step1X-Edit: A Practical Framework for General Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.17761/) (2025)
- [Training Language Models to Self-Correct via Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12917/) (2024)
- [OmniGen: Unified Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.11340/) (2024)
- [BLIP3-o: A Family of Fully Open Unified Multimodal Models-Architecture, Training and Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09568/) (2025)
- [SEED-X: Multimodal Models with Unified Multi-granularity Comprehension and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.14396/) (2024)
- [DreamLLM: Synergistic Multimodal Comprehension and Creation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.11499/) (2023)
- [Alphazero-like Tree-Search can Guide Large Language Model Decoding and Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.17179/) (2023)

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

- [Interleaving Reasoning for Better Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.06945/) (2025)
- [Beyond Language Modeling: An Exploration of Multimodal Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.03276/) (2026)
- [SAM-R1: Leveraging SAM for Reward Feedback in Multimodal Segmentation via Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.22596/) (2025)
- [UniREditBench: A Unified Reasoning-based Image Editing Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.01295/) (2025)
- [Reinforcing Video Reasoning Segmentation to Think Before It Segments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.11538/) (2025)
- [Demystifying Video Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.16870/) (2026)
- [HaploOmni: Unified Single Transformer for Multimodal Video Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.02975/) (2025)
- [UniReason 1.0: A Unified Reasoning Framework for World Knowledge Aligned Image Generation and Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.02437/) (2026)
- [JoyAI-Image: Awaking Spatial Intelligence in Unified Multimodal Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.04128/) (2026)
- [Does Understanding Inform Generation in Unified Multimodal Models? From Analysis to Path Forward](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.20561/) (2025)
- [SpatialEdit: Benchmarking Fine-Grained Image Spatial Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.04911/) (2026)
- [Video-as-Answer: Predict and Generate Next Video Event with Joint-GRPO](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.16669/) (2025)
- [COOPER: A Unified Model for Cooperative Perception and Reasoning in Spatial Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.04563/) (2025)
- [MILR: Improving Multimodal Image Generation via Test-Time Latent Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.22761/) (2025)
- [UniT: Unified Multimodal Chain-of-Thought Test-time Scaling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.12279/) (2026)
- [PreciseCache: Precise Feature Caching for Efficient and High-fidelity Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.00976/) (2026)
- [M3: High-fidelity Text-to-Image Generation via Multi-Modal, Multi-Agent and Multi-Round Visual Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.06166/) (2026)
- [LoRA-Gen: Specializing Large Language Model via Online LoRA Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.11638/) (2025)
- [MedREK: Retrieval-Based Editing for Medical LLMs with Key-Aware Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.13500/) (2025)
- [ShowTable: Unlocking Creative Table Visualization with Collaborative Reflection and Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.13303/) (2025)
- [UniModel: A Visual-Only Framework for Unified Multimodal Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.16917/) (2025)
- [MiLDEdit: Reasoning-Based Multi-Layer Design Document Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.04589/) (2026)
- [Towards Physics of Multimodal Pretraining: Knowledge Flow, Modality Synergy, Early Unification, and Recipes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.05000/) (2026)
- [EffectMaker: Unifying Reasoning and Generation for Customized Visual Effect Creation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.06014/) (2026)
- [PixelUMM: Encoder-Free Unified Image and Video Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.38597/) (2026)
- [Synergizing Understanding and Generation with Interleaved Analyzing-Drafting Thinking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.21435/) (2026)
- [RCoT-Seg: Reinforced Chain-of-Thought for Video Reasoning and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.07334/) (2026)
- [Uni-Synergy: Bridging Understanding and Generation for Personalized Reasoning via Co-operative Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.10445/) (2026)
- [UniCanvas: A Diffusion-base Unified Model for Text-in-Image Joint Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.04264/) (2026)
- [Be Consistent! Enhancing Robust Visual Reasoning in LVLMs with Consistency Constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.21722/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent text-to-image systems face limitations in handling multimodal inputs and complex reasoning tasks. We introduce MindOmni, a unified multimodal large language model that addresses these challenges by incorporating reasoning generation through reinforcement learning. MindOmni leverages a three-phase training strategy: i) design of a unified vision language model with a decoder-only diffusion module, ii) supervised fine-tuning with Chain-of-Thought (CoT) instruction data, and iii) our proposed Reasoning Generation Policy Optimization (RGPO) algorithm, utilizing multimodal feedback to effectively guide policy updates. Experimental results demonstrate that MindOmni outperforms existing models, achieving impressive performance on both understanding and generation benchmarks, meanwhile showcasing advanced fine-grained reasoning generation capabilities, especially with mathematical reasoning instruction. All codes will be made public at https://github.com/TencentARC/MindOmni