mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

V-Zero: Self-Improving Multimodal Reasoning with Zero Annotation

arXiv 2601.10094 ↗First posted 15 Jan 2026cs.CV cs.AI cs.LGcited by 9

On the map: LLM reasoning → Multimodal reasoning

also in 2 more
Abstract (arXiv)

Recent advances in multimodal learning have significantly enhanced the reasoning capabilities of vision-language models (VLMs). However, state-of-the-art approaches rely heavily on large-scale human-annotated datasets, which are costly and time-consuming to acquire. To overcome this limitation, we introduce V-Zero, a general post-training framework that facilitates self-improvement using exclusively unlabeled images. V-Zero establishes a co-evolutionary loop by instantiating two distinct roles: a Questioner and a Solver. The Questioner learns to synthesize high-quality, challenging questions by leveraging a dual-track reasoning reward that contrasts intuitive guesses with reasoned results. The Solver is optimized using pseudo-labels derived from majority voting over its own sampled responses. Both roles are trained iteratively via Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), driving a cycle of mutual enhancement. Remarkably, without a single human annotation, V-Zero achieves consistent performance gains on Qwen2.5-VL-7B-Instruct, improving visual mathematical reasoning by +1.7 and general vision-centric by +2.6, demonstrating the potential of self-improvement in multimodal systems. Code is available at https://github.com/SatonoDia/V-Zero

Key facts. Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Multimodal reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning. Builds on 28 of its 33 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 15 Jan 2026.

Builds on

28 of 33 references.

Closest ancestors · 8

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2025Perception-R1: Pioneering Perception Policy with Reinforcement Learning10 Apr
  2. 2025SoTA with Less: MCTS-Guided Sample Selection for Data-Efficient Visual Reasoning Self-Improvement10 Apr
  3. 2025OpenVLThinker: Complex Vision-Language Reasoning via Iterative SFT-RL Cycles21 Mar
  4. 2025R1-Onevision: Advancing Generalized Multimodal Reasoning through Cross-Modal Formalization13 Mar
  5. 2025Vision-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in Multimodal Large Language Models9 Mar
  6. 2024LogicVista: Multimodal LLM Logical Reasoning Benchmark in Visual Contexts6 Jul
  7. 2024Measuring Multimodal Mathematical Reasoning with MATH-Vision Dataset22 Feb
  8. 2023MathVista: Evaluating Mathematical Reasoning of Foundation Models in Visual Contexts3 Oct

Other references · 20

  1. 2022Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Modelscited by 12,302
  2. 2024DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Modelscited by 8,851
  3. 2025DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learningcited by 6,146
  4. 2025Qwen2.5-VL Technical Reportcited by 5,418
  5. 2025Qwen3-VL Technical Reportcited by 2,534
  6. 2023MMMU: A Massive Multi-discipline Multimodal Understanding and Reasoning Benchmark for Expert AGIcited by 2,044
  7. 2024HybridFlow: A Flexible and Efficient RLHF Frameworkcited by 1,980
  8. 2024Are We on the Right Way for Evaluating Large Vision-Language Models?cited by 893
  9. 2024MathVerse: Does Your Multi-modal LLM Truly See the Diagrams in Visual Math Problems?cited by 573
  10. 2025Absolute Zero: Reinforced Self-play Reasoning with Zero Datacited by 323
  11. 2025R1-VL: Learning to Reason with Multimodal Large Language Models via Step-wise Group Relative Policy Optimizationcited by 296
  12. 2025R-Zero: Self-Evolving Reasoning LLM from Zero Datacited by 210
8 more
  1. 2024An Introduction to Vision-Language Modelingcited by 175
  2. 2024Mulberry: Empowering MLLM with o1-like Reasoning and Reflection via Collective Monte Carlo Tree Searchcited by 171
  3. 2025GenPRM: Scaling Test-Time Compute of Process Reward Models via Generative Reasoningcited by 94
  4. 2025SPIRAL: Self-Play on Zero-Sum Games Incentivizes Reasoning via Multi-Agent Multi-Turn Reinforcement Learningcited by 89
  5. 2025SPICE: Self-Play In Corpus Environments Improves Reasoningcited by 78
  6. 2025Language Self-Play For Data-Free Trainingcited by 42
  7. 2025SPC: Evolving Self-Play Critic via Adversarial Games for LLM Reasoningcited by 40
  8. 2025Vision-Zero: Scalable VLM Self-Improvement via Strategic Gamified Self-Playcited by 37

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 9.

9 papers.

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2025See, Think, Learn: A Self-Taught Multimodal Reasoner
  2. 2025VReST: Enhancing Reasoning in Large Vision-Language Models through Tree Search and Self-Reward Mechanism
  3. 2026Learn to Think: Improving Multimodal Reasoning through Vision-Aware Self-Improvement Training
  4. 2025VisPlay: Self-Evolving Vision-Language Models from Images
  5. 2024Zero-Shot Visual Reasoning by Vision-Language Models: Benchmarking and Analysis
  6. 2025SyncLoop: A Multimodal Dual-Loop Framework for Self-Improving Mathematical Reasoning
  7. 2026RISE: Reliable Improvement in Self-Evolving Vision-Language Models
  8. 2026V-Zero: Answer-Label-Free On-Policy Distillation with Contrastive Evidence Gating for Fine-Grained Visual Reasoning