mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

Vero: An Open RL Recipe for General Visual Reasoning

arXiv 2604.04917 ↗First posted 6 Apr 2026cs.CV cs.AI cs.CLcited by 11

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

  1. 2025OneThinker: All-in-one Reasoning Model for Image and Video2 Dec
  2. 2025Visual Jigsaw Post-Training Improves MLLMs29 Sep
  3. 2025We-Math 2.0: A Versatile MathBook System for Incentivizing Visual Mathematical Reasoning14 Aug
  4. 2025GLM-4.5V and GLM-4.1V-Thinking: Towards Versatile Multimodal Reasoning with Scalable Reinforcement Learning1 Jul
  5. 2025MiMo-VL Technical Report4 Jun
  6. 2025Game-RL: Synthesizing Multimodal Verifiable Game Data to Boost VLMs' General Reasoning20 May
  7. 2025Kimi-VL Technical Report10 Apr
  8. 2025KARL: Knowledge-Aware Reasoning and Reinforcement Learning for Knowledge-Intensive Visual Grounding17 Mar
  9. 2025V-STaR: Benchmarking Video-LLMs on Video Spatio-Temporal Reasoning14 Mar
  10. 2025MM-Eureka: Exploring the Frontiers of Multimodal Reasoning with Rule-based Reinforcement Learning10 Mar

Other references · 23

  1. 2017Proximal Policy Optimization Algorithmscited by 15,215
  2. 2024DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Modelscited by 9,379
  3. 2025Qwen2.5-VL Technical Reportcited by 5,587
  4. 2025Gemini 2.5: Pushing the Frontier with Advanced Reasoning, Multimodality, Long Context, and Next Generation Agentic Capabilitiescited by 3,796
  5. 2024Gemini 1.5: Unlocking multimodal understanding across millions of tokens of contextcited by 3,224
  6. 2025Qwen3-VL Technical Reportcited by 2,793
  7. 2025OpenAI GPT-5 System Cardcited by 989
  8. 2023Gemini: A Family of Highly Capable Multimodal Modelscited by 872
  9. 2025Group Sequence Policy Optimizationcited by 835
  10. 2026Kimi K2.5: Visual Agentic Intelligencecited by 501
  11. 2020PathVQA: 30000+ Questions for Medical Visual Question Answeringcited by 475
  12. 2025LLaVA-OneVision-1.5: Fully Open Framework for Democratized Multimodal Trainingcited by 244
11 more
  1. 2026Molmo2: Open Weights and Data for Vision-Language Models with Video Understanding and Groundingcited by 139
  2. 2025Olmo 3cited by 129
  3. 2023GeomVerse: A Systematic Evaluation of Large Models for Geometric Reasoningcited by 108
  4. 2025Gemini Robotics: Bringing AI into the Physical Worldcited by 83
  5. 2025Defeating the Training-Inference Mismatch via FP16cited by 66
  6. 2024MM-Vet v2: A Challenging Benchmark to Evaluate Large Multimodal Models for Integrated Capabilitiescited by 57
  7. 2025FineVision: Open Data Is All You Needcited by 53
  8. 2019Ray Interference: a Source of Plateaus in Deep Reinforcement Learningcited by 40
  9. 2025Metacognitive Reuse: Turning Recurring LLM Reasoning Into Concise Behaviorscited by 30
  10. 2025Cognitive Foundations for Reasoning and Their Manifestation in LLMscited by 26
  11. 2025CountQA: How Well Do MLLMs Count in the Wild?cited by 19

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 11.

11 papers.

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2025VisRes Bench: On Evaluating the Visual Reasoning Capabilities of VLMs
  2. 2025No Labels, No Problem: Training Visual Reasoners with Multimodal Verifiers
  3. 2026WM-VLM: Probing Internal World Models for Interleaved Visual-Textual Reasoning
  4. 2025Diagnosing Visual Reasoning: Challenges, Insights, and a Path Forward
  5. 2025Reinforced Visual Perception with Tools
  6. 2025Vision-G1: Towards General Vision Language Reasoning with Multi-Domain Data Curation
  7. 2024From the Least to the Most: Building a Plug-and-Play Visual Reasoner via Data Synthesis
  8. 2025Rethinking RL Scaling for Vision Language Models: A Transparent, From-Scratch Framework and Comprehensive Evaluation Scheme