# MiCo: Multi-image Contrast for Reinforcement Visual Reasoning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.22434 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.22434/

## Key facts

- Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Multimodal reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 24 of its 46 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Jun 2025.

## Placed in

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

## Builds on (most cited first, 24 of 24)

- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Qwen2.5-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13923/) (2025)
- [GPT-4o System Card](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.21276/) (2024)
- [Qwen2-VL: Enhancing Vision-Language Model's Perception of the World at Any Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12191/) (2024)
- [OpenAI o1 System Card](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.16720/) (2024)
- [Kimi k1.5: Scaling Reinforcement Learning with LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12599/) (2025)
- [LLaVA-NeXT-Interleave: Tackling Multi-image, Video, and 3D in Large Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.07895/) (2024)
- [LLaVA-Video: Video Instruction Tuning With Synthetic Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.02713/) (2024)
- [Long Context Transfer from Language to Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.16852/) (2024)
- [MM-Eureka: Exploring the Frontiers of Multimodal Reasoning with Rule-based Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.07365/) (2025)
- [LMM-R1: Empowering 3B LMMs with Strong Reasoning Abilities Through Two-Stage Rule-Based RL](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.07536/) (2025)
- [SFT or RL? An Early Investigation into Training R1-Like Reasoning Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.11468/) (2025)
- [Seed1.5-Thinking: Advancing Superb Reasoning Models with Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.13914/) (2025)
- [SoTA with Less: MCTS-Guided Sample Selection for Data-Efficient Visual Reasoning Self-Improvement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.07934/) (2025)
- [Reason-RFT: Reinforcement Fine-Tuning for Visual Reasoning of Vision Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20752/) (2025)
- [NoisyRollout: Reinforcing Visual Reasoning with Data Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.13055/) (2025)
- [Skywork R1V: Pioneering Multimodal Reasoning with Chain-of-Thought](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.05599/) (2025)
- [VidGen-1M: A Large-Scale Dataset for Text-to-video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.02629/) (2024)
- [Benchmarking Multi-Image Understanding in Vision and Language Models: Perception, Knowledge, Reasoning, and Multi-Hop Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.12742/) (2024)
- [VLM2-Bench: A Closer Look at How Well VLMs Implicitly Link Explicit Matching Visual Cues](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.12084/) (2025)
- [Are They the Same? Exploring Visual Correspondence Shortcomings of Multimodal LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.04670/) (2025)
- [Weaving Context Across Images: Improving Vision-Language Models through Focus-Centric Visual Chains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.20199/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [Vision-Zero: Scalable VLM Self-Improvement via Strategic Gamified Self-Play](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.25541/) (2025)
- [ReMoT: Reinforcement Learning with Motion Contrast Triplets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.00461/) (2026)
- [Mitigating Perceptual Judgment Bias in Multimodal LLM-as-a-Judge via Perceptual Perturbation and Reward Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.02578/) (2026)
- [TPRU: Advancing Temporal and Procedural Understanding in Large Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.18884/) (2026)
- [RSICCLLM: A Multimodal Large Language Model for Remote Sensing Image Change Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.28266/) (2026)
- [DataClaw0: Agentic Tailoring Multimodal Data from Raw Streams](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.21337/) (2026)
- [From Structure to Synergy: A Survey of Vision-Language Perception Paradigm Evolution in Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.26196/) (2026)
- [Safe Alone, Unsafe Together: Safeguarding Against Implicit Toxicity When Benign Images Combine](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.00576/) (2026)
- [CoRe: A Comprehensive Framework for Cross-Image Comparative Reasoning in Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.12786/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This work explores enabling Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning to link visual cues across multiple images. A straightforward solution is to adapt rule-based reinforcement learning for Vision-Language Models (VLMs). However, such methods typically rely on manually curated question-answer pairs, which can be particularly challenging when dealing with fine grained visual details and complex logic across images. Inspired by self-supervised visual representation learning, we observe that images contain inherent constraints that can serve as supervision. Based on this insight, we construct image triplets comprising two augmented views of the same image and a third, similar but distinct image. During training, the model is prompted to generate a reasoning process to compare these images (i.e., determine same or different). Then we optimize the model with rule-based reinforcement learning. Due to the high visual similarity and the presence of augmentations, the model must attend to subtle visual changes and perform logical reasoning to succeed. Experiments show that, although trained solely on visual comparison tasks, the learned reasoning ability generalizes effectively to a wide range of questions. Without relying on any human-annotated question-answer pairs, our method achieves significant improvements on multi-image reasoning benchmarks and shows strong performance on general vision tasks.