Vero: An Open RL Recipe for General Visual Reasoning
On the map: LLM reasoning → Multimodal reasoning
Abstract (arXiv)
What does it take to build a visual reasoner that works across charts, science, spatial understanding, and open-ended tasks? The strongest vision-language models (VLMs) suggest that broad visual reasoning is within reach, yet their closed data and reinforcement learning (RL) pipelines make their gains difficult to study, reproduce, or extend. We introduce Vero, a family of fully open VLMs that match or exceed existing open-weight models across diverse visual reasoning tasks. We scale RL data and rewards across six broad task categories, constructing Vero-600K, a 600K-sample dataset from 59 datasets, and designing task-routed rewards that handle heterogeneous answers. Across VeroEval, our 30-benchmark suite, Vero-600K outperforms existing RL datasets under controlled comparisons. Applied to five starting models, Vero variants gain 2.9-5.4 points on average over their initial models. Notably, Vero-Qwen3I-8B, trained on the Instruct model, surpasses Qwen3-VL-8B-Thinking by 3.8 points on average without additional distillation. Systematic ablations reveal that different task categories elicit distinct reasoning patterns and that broad gains depend on learning them jointly rather than in isolation. All data, code, and models are publicly available.
Key facts. Cited by 11 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Multimodal reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning. Builds on 33 of its 115 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 6 Apr 2026.
Builds on
33 of 115 references.
Closest ancestors · 10
Same direction, newest first
- 2025OneThinker: All-in-one Reasoning Model for Image and Video2 Dec
- 2025Visual Jigsaw Post-Training Improves MLLMs29 Sep
- 2025We-Math 2.0: A Versatile MathBook System for Incentivizing Visual Mathematical Reasoning14 Aug
- 2025GLM-4.5V and GLM-4.1V-Thinking: Towards Versatile Multimodal Reasoning with Scalable Reinforcement Learning1 Jul
- 2025MiMo-VL Technical Report4 Jun
- 2025Game-RL: Synthesizing Multimodal Verifiable Game Data to Boost VLMs' General Reasoning20 May
- 2025Kimi-VL Technical Report10 Apr
- 2025KARL: Knowledge-Aware Reasoning and Reinforcement Learning for Knowledge-Intensive Visual Grounding17 Mar
- 2025V-STaR: Benchmarking Video-LLMs on Video Spatio-Temporal Reasoning14 Mar
- 2025MM-Eureka: Exploring the Frontiers of Multimodal Reasoning with Rule-based Reinforcement Learning10 Mar
Other references · 23
- 2017Proximal Policy Optimization Algorithmscited by 15,215
- 2024DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Modelscited by 9,379
- 2025Qwen2.5-VL Technical Reportcited by 5,587
- 2025Gemini 2.5: Pushing the Frontier with Advanced Reasoning, Multimodality, Long Context, and Next Generation Agentic Capabilitiescited by 3,796
- 2024Gemini 1.5: Unlocking multimodal understanding across millions of tokens of contextcited by 3,224
- 2025Qwen3-VL Technical Reportcited by 2,793
- 2025OpenAI GPT-5 System Cardcited by 989
- 2023Gemini: A Family of Highly Capable Multimodal Modelscited by 872
- 2025Group Sequence Policy Optimizationcited by 835
- 2026Kimi K2.5: Visual Agentic Intelligencecited by 501
- 2020PathVQA: 30000+ Questions for Medical Visual Question Answeringcited by 475
- 2025LLaVA-OneVision-1.5: Fully Open Framework for Democratized Multimodal Trainingcited by 244
11 more
- 2026Molmo2: Open Weights and Data for Vision-Language Models with Video Understanding and Groundingcited by 139
- 2025Olmo 3cited by 129
- 2023GeomVerse: A Systematic Evaluation of Large Models for Geometric Reasoningcited by 108
- 2025Gemini Robotics: Bringing AI into the Physical Worldcited by 83
- 2025Defeating the Training-Inference Mismatch via FP16cited by 66
- 2024MM-Vet v2: A Challenging Benchmark to Evaluate Large Multimodal Models for Integrated Capabilitiescited by 57
- 2025FineVision: Open Data Is All You Needcited by 53
- 2019Ray Interference: a Source of Plateaus in Deep Reinforcement Learningcited by 40
- 2025Metacognitive Reuse: Turning Recurring LLM Reasoning Into Concise Behaviorscited by 30
- 2025Cognitive Foundations for Reasoning and Their Manifestation in LLMscited by 26
- 2025CountQA: How Well Do MLLMs Count in the Wild?cited by 19
Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2026: 11.
11 papers.
- 2026When Teachers Mislead: Spurious-Signal-Aware On-Policy Distillationcited by 5
- 2026Veritas++: Value-aware On-Policy Distillation for Perception-Enhanced AIGI Detectioncited by 2
- 2026Trace: A Taxonomy-Guided Environment for Multidomain Visual Reasoningcited by 1
- 2026MIRROR: Learning from the Other View for Multi-Modal Reasoningcited by 1
- 2026Beacon: Knowing When and How to Perform Agentic Visual Reasoningcited by 1
- 2026OpenVisTool: An Open Recipe for Synthesizing Instructive Visual Tool-Use Trajectoriescited by 1
- 2026MMVistaReason: Toward Open-Data and Post-Training Recipes for Multimodal Reasoningcited by 1
- 2026VisionPsy-Nano: Improving Accuracy, Efficiency, and Reliability in On-Device Vision-Language Modelscited by 0
- 2026EviViT: Evidence-Adaptive Vision Transformers for Fine-Grained Perceptioncited by 0
- 2026Harnessing Domain Specialists in Multimodal Mixture-of-Experts for Efficient Adaptationcited by 0
- 2026Trinity: Self-Evolving Vision-Language Models with a Self-Verifiercited by 0
- 2026Trinity: Self-Evolving Vision-Language Models with a Self-Verifier3 Oct 2026
- 2026Harnessing Domain Specialists in Multimodal Mixture-of-Experts for Efficient Adaptation1 Oct 2026
- 2026MMVistaReason: Toward Open-Data and Post-Training Recipes for Multimodal Reasoning1 Oct 2026
- 2026EviViT: Evidence-Adaptive Vision Transformers for Fine-Grained Perception29 Sep 2026
- 2026VisionPsy-Nano: Improving Accuracy, Efficiency, and Reliability in On-Device Vision-Language Models23 Sep 2026
- 2026OpenVisTool: An Open Recipe for Synthesizing Instructive Visual Tool-Use Trajectories9 Aug 2026
- 2026When Teachers Mislead: Spurious-Signal-Aware On-Policy Distillation4 Aug 2026
- 2026Beacon: Knowing When and How to Perform Agentic Visual Reasoning30 Jul 2026
- 2026Veritas++: Value-aware On-Policy Distillation for Perception-Enhanced AIGI Detection29 Jul 2026
- 2026MIRROR: Learning from the Other View for Multi-Modal Reasoning23 Jul 2026
- 2026Trace: A Taxonomy-Guided Environment for Multidomain Visual Reasoning22 Jul 2026
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