V-Zero: Self-Improving Multimodal Reasoning with Zero Annotation
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
- 2025Perception-R1: Pioneering Perception Policy with Reinforcement Learning10 Apr
- 2025SoTA with Less: MCTS-Guided Sample Selection for Data-Efficient Visual Reasoning Self-Improvement10 Apr
- 2025OpenVLThinker: Complex Vision-Language Reasoning via Iterative SFT-RL Cycles21 Mar
- 2025R1-Onevision: Advancing Generalized Multimodal Reasoning through Cross-Modal Formalization13 Mar
- 2025Vision-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in Multimodal Large Language Models9 Mar
- 2024LogicVista: Multimodal LLM Logical Reasoning Benchmark in Visual Contexts6 Jul
- 2024Measuring Multimodal Mathematical Reasoning with MATH-Vision Dataset22 Feb
- 2023MathVista: Evaluating Mathematical Reasoning of Foundation Models in Visual Contexts3 Oct
Other references · 20
- 2022Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Modelscited by 12,302
- 2024DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Modelscited by 8,851
- 2025DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learningcited by 6,146
- 2025Qwen2.5-VL Technical Reportcited by 5,418
- 2025Qwen3-VL Technical Reportcited by 2,534
- 2023MMMU: A Massive Multi-discipline Multimodal Understanding and Reasoning Benchmark for Expert AGIcited by 2,044
- 2024HybridFlow: A Flexible and Efficient RLHF Frameworkcited by 1,980
- 2024Are We on the Right Way for Evaluating Large Vision-Language Models?cited by 893
- 2024MathVerse: Does Your Multi-modal LLM Truly See the Diagrams in Visual Math Problems?cited by 573
- 2025Absolute Zero: Reinforced Self-play Reasoning with Zero Datacited by 323
- 2025R1-VL: Learning to Reason with Multimodal Large Language Models via Step-wise Group Relative Policy Optimizationcited by 296
- 2025R-Zero: Self-Evolving Reasoning LLM from Zero Datacited by 210
8 more
- 2024An Introduction to Vision-Language Modelingcited by 175
- 2024Mulberry: Empowering MLLM with o1-like Reasoning and Reflection via Collective Monte Carlo Tree Searchcited by 171
- 2025GenPRM: Scaling Test-Time Compute of Process Reward Models via Generative Reasoningcited by 94
- 2025SPIRAL: Self-Play on Zero-Sum Games Incentivizes Reasoning via Multi-Agent Multi-Turn Reinforcement Learningcited by 89
- 2025SPICE: Self-Play In Corpus Environments Improves Reasoningcited by 78
- 2025Language Self-Play For Data-Free Trainingcited by 42
- 2025SPC: Evolving Self-Play Critic via Adversarial Games for LLM Reasoningcited by 40
- 2025Vision-Zero: Scalable VLM Self-Improvement via Strategic Gamified Self-Playcited by 37
Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2026: 9.
9 papers.
- 2026MM-Zero: Self-Evolving Multi-Model Vision Language Models From Zero Datacited by 16
- 2026SpatialEvo: Self-Evolving Spatial Intelligence via Deterministic Geometric Environmentscited by 4
- 2026Adaptive Time Series Reasoning via Segment Selectioncited by 3
- 2026EVE: Verifiable Self-Evolution of MLLMs via Executable Visual Transformationscited by 3
- 2026EvoVid: Temporal-Centric Self-Evolution for Video Large Language Modelscited by 2
- 2026Ouroboros-Spatial: Closing the Data-Model Loop for Spatial Reasoningcited by 1
- 2026Adapting Reinforcement Learning with Chain-of-Thought Supervision for Explainable Detection of Hateful and Propagandistic Memescited by 1
- 2026VeriEvol: Scaling Multimodal Mathematical Reasoning via Verifiable Evol-Instructcited by 0
- 2026VICO: Visual Environments Co-Evolving for Vision-Language Model Reasoningcited by 0
- 2026VICO: Visual Environments Co-Evolving for Vision-Language Model Reasoning7 Oct 2026
- 2026VeriEvol: Scaling Multimodal Mathematical Reasoning via Verifiable Evol-Instruct22 Jun 2026
- 2026Adapting Reinforcement Learning with Chain-of-Thought Supervision for Explainable Detection of Hateful and Propagandistic Memes13 Jun 2026
- 2026Ouroboros-Spatial: Closing the Data-Model Loop for Spatial Reasoning10 Jun 2026
- 2026EvoVid: Temporal-Centric Self-Evolution for Video Large Language Models21 May 2026
- 2026EVE: Verifiable Self-Evolution of MLLMs via Executable Visual Transformations20 Apr 2026
- 2026SpatialEvo: Self-Evolving Spatial Intelligence via Deterministic Geometric Environments15 Apr 2026
- 2026MM-Zero: Self-Evolving Multi-Model Vision Language Models From Zero Data10 Mar 2026
- 2026Adaptive Time Series Reasoning via Segment Selection20 Feb 2026
Similar, not cited
Close in wording, no citation either way
- 2025See, Think, Learn: A Self-Taught Multimodal Reasoner
- 2025VReST: Enhancing Reasoning in Large Vision-Language Models through Tree Search and Self-Reward Mechanism
- 2026Learn to Think: Improving Multimodal Reasoning through Vision-Aware Self-Improvement Training
- 2025VisPlay: Self-Evolving Vision-Language Models from Images
- 2024Zero-Shot Visual Reasoning by Vision-Language Models: Benchmarking and Analysis
- 2025SyncLoop: A Multimodal Dual-Loop Framework for Self-Improving Mathematical Reasoning
- 2026RISE: Reliable Improvement in Self-Evolving Vision-Language Models
- 2026V-Zero: Answer-Label-Free On-Policy Distillation with Contrastive Evidence Gating for Fine-Grained Visual Reasoning