mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

OpenVLThinkerV2: A Generalist Multimodal Reasoning Model for Multi-domain Visual Tasks

arXiv 2604.08539 ↗First posted 9 Apr 2026cs.CV cs.AI cs.CLcited by 2

On the map: LLM reasoning → Multimodal reasoning

also in 1 more
Abstract (arXiv)

Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) has emerged as the de facto Reinforcement Learning (RL) objective driving recent advancements in Multimodal Large Language Models. However, extending this success to open-source multimodal generalist models remains heavily constrained by two primary challenges: the extreme variance in reward topologies across diverse visual tasks, and the inherent difficulty of balancing fine-grained perception with multi-step reasoning capabilities. To address these issues, we introduce Gaussian GRPO (G2RPO), a novel RL training objective that replaces standard linear scaling with non-linear distributional matching. By mathematically forcing the advantage distribution of any given task to strictly converge to a standard normal distribution, N(0,1), G2RPO theoretically ensures inter-task gradient equity, mitigates vulnerabilities to heavy-tail outliers, and offers symmetric update for positive and negative rewards. Leveraging the enhanced training stability provided by G2RPO, we introduce two task-level shaping mechanisms to seamlessly balance perception and reasoning. First, response length shaping dynamically elicits extended reasoning chains for complex queries while enforce direct outputs to bolster visual grounding. Second, entropy shaping tightly bounds the model's exploration zone, effectively preventing both entropy collapse and entropy explosion. Integrating these methodologies, we present OpenVLThinkerV2, a highly robust, general-purpose multimodal model. Extensive evaluations across 18 diverse benchmarks demonstrate its superior performance over strong open-source and leading proprietary frontier models.

Key facts. Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Multimodal reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning. Builds on 64 of its 68 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 9 Apr 2026.

Builds on

64 of 68 references.

Closest ancestors · 23

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2025See Less, See Right: Bi-directional Perceptual Shaping For Multimodal Reasoning26 Dec
  2. 2025Learning When to Look: A Disentangled Curriculum for Strategic Perception in Multimodal Reasoning19 Dec
  3. 2025OneThinker: All-in-one Reasoning Model for Image and Video2 Dec
  4. 2025Open-o3-Video: Grounded Video Reasoning with Explicit Spatio-Temporal Evidence23 Oct
  5. 2025CodePlot-CoT: Mathematical Visual Reasoning by Thinking with Code-Driven Images13 Oct
  6. 2025More Thought, Less Accuracy? On the Dual Nature of Reasoning in Vision-Language Models30 Sep
  7. 2025Perception-Consistency Multimodal Large Language Models Reasoning via Caption-Regularized Policy Optimization26 Sep
  8. 2025Vision-G1: Towards General Vision Language Reasoning with Multi-Domain Data Curation18 Aug
  9. 2025DocThinker: Explainable Multimodal Large Language Models with Rule-based Reinforcement Learning for Document Understanding12 Aug
  10. 2025VisionThink: Smart and Efficient Vision Language Model via Reinforcement Learning17 Jul
  11. 2025Perception-Aware Policy Optimization for Multimodal Reasoning8 Jul
  12. 2025Advancing Multimodal Reasoning: From Optimized Cold Start to Staged Reinforcement Learning4 Jun
11 more
  1. 2025Reinforcement Fine-Tuning Powers Reasoning Capability of Multimodal Large Language Models24 May
  2. 2025DeepEyes: Incentivizing "Thinking with Images" via Reinforcement Learning20 May
  3. 2025VL-Rethinker: Incentivizing Self-Reflection of Vision-Language Models with Reinforcement Learning10 Apr
  4. 2025VLM-R1: A Stable and Generalizable R1-style Large Vision-Language Model10 Apr
  5. 2025Video-R1: Reinforcing Video Reasoning in MLLMs27 Mar
  6. 2025MM-Eureka: Exploring the Frontiers of Multimodal Reasoning with Rule-based Reinforcement Learning10 Mar
  7. 2025Visual-RFT: Visual Reinforcement Fine-Tuning3 Mar
  8. 2024Measuring Multimodal Mathematical Reasoning with MATH-Vision Dataset22 Feb
  9. 2023MathVista: Evaluating Mathematical Reasoning of Foundation Models in Visual Contexts3 Oct
  10. 2023MMBench: Is Your Multi-modal Model an All-around Player?12 Jul
  11. 2022ChartQA: A Benchmark for Question Answering about Charts with Visual and Logical Reasoning19 Mar

Other references · 41

  1. 2024GPT-4o System Cardcited by 4,467
  2. 2025Gemini 2.5: Pushing the Frontier with Advanced Reasoning, Multimodality, Long Context, and Next Generation Agentic Capabilitiescited by 3,655
  3. 2023Grounding DINO: Marrying DINO with Grounded Pre-Training for Open-Set Object Detectioncited by 3,274
  4. 2024Gemini 1.5: Unlocking multimodal understanding across millions of tokens of contextcited by 3,175
  5. 2025DAPO: An Open-Source LLM Reinforcement Learning System at Scalecited by 2,678
  6. 2025Qwen3-VL Technical Reportcited by 2,534
  7. 2023MMMU: A Massive Multi-discipline Multimodal Understanding and Reasoning Benchmark for Expert AGIcited by 2,044
  8. 2020DocVQA: A Dataset for VQA on Document Imagescited by 1,288
  9. 2025Understanding R1-Zero-Like Training: A Critical Perspectivecited by 1,276
  10. 2016Modeling Context in Referring Expressionscited by 1,054
  11. 2024Are We on the Right Way for Evaluating Large Vision-Language Models?cited by 893
  12. 2016A Diagram Is Worth A Dozen Imagescited by 793
29 more
  1. 2025Group Sequence Policy Optimizationcited by 788
  2. 2024MathVerse: Does Your Multi-modal LLM Truly See the Diagrams in Visual Math Problems?cited by 573
  3. 2023OCRBench: On the Hidden Mystery of OCR in Large Multimodal Modelscited by 466
  4. 2025Group-in-Group Policy Optimization for LLM Agent Trainingcited by 442
  5. 2021InfographicVQAcited by 430
  6. 2025Towards Reasoning Era: A Survey of Long Chain-of-Thought for Reasoning Large Language Modelscited by 381
  7. 2024SpatialRGPT: Grounded Spatial Reasoning in Vision Language Modelscited by 297
  8. 2025Logic-RL: Unleashing LLM Reasoning with Rule-Based Reinforcement Learningcited by 260
  9. 2024CharXiv: Charting Gaps in Realistic Chart Understanding in Multimodal LLMscited by 229
  10. 2025Agentic Reinforced Policy Optimizationcited by 166
  11. 2025GPG: A Simple and Strong Reinforcement Learning Baseline for Model Reasoningcited by 147
  12. 2024RoboSpatial: Teaching Spatial Understanding to 2D and 3D Vision-Language Models for Roboticscited by 133
  13. 2025RoboRefer: Towards Spatial Referring with Reasoning in Vision-Language Models for Roboticscited by 125
  14. 2025DeepEyesV2: Toward Agentic Multimodal Modelcited by 119
  15. 2024EmbSpatial-Bench: Benchmarking Spatial Understanding for Embodied Tasks with Large Vision-Language Modelscited by 100
  16. 2025Critique-GRPO: Advancing LLM Reasoning with Natural Language and Numerical Feedbackcited by 86
  17. 2025Seeing but Not Believing: Probing the Disconnect Between Visual Attention and Answer Correctness in VLMscited by 48
  18. 2025G2VLM: Geometry Grounded Vision Language Model with Unified 3D Reconstruction and Spatial Reasoningcited by 39
  19. 2025Vision-Zero: Scalable VLM Self-Improvement via Strategic Gamified Self-Playcited by 37
  20. 2024Distributional Preference Alignment of LLMs via Optimal Transportcited by 26
  21. 2025STAR-R1: Spatial TrAnsformation Reasoning by Reinforcing Multimodal LLMscited by 21
  22. 2025Uncalibrated Reasoning: GRPO Induces Overconfidence for Stochastic Outcomescited by 21
  23. 2025SpaceVista: All-Scale Visual Spatial Reasoning from mm to kmcited by 18
  24. 2025ARES: Multimodal Adaptive Reasoning via Difficulty-Aware Token-Level Entropy Shapingcited by 16
  25. 2024Space-LLaVA: a Vision-Language Model Adapted to Extraterrestrial Applicationscited by 14
  26. 2025MAPO: Mixed Advantage Policy Optimizationcited by 11
  27. 2025Optimal Transport-Based Token Weighting scheme for Enhanced Preference Optimizationcited by 7
  28. 2026Semantic-aware Wasserstein Policy Regularization for Large Language Model Alignmentcited by 2
  29. 2026Efficient Refusal Ablation in LLM through Optimal Transportcited by 1

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Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 2.

2 papers.

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

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  3. 2026Dr. Seg: Revisiting GRPO Training for Visual Large Language Models through Perception-Oriented Design
  4. 2025ViSS-R1: Self-Supervised Reinforcement Video Reasoning
  5. 2025Skywork R1V2: Multimodal Hybrid Reinforcement Learning for Reasoning
  6. 2026DIVA-GRPO: Enhancing Multimodal Reasoning through Difficulty-Adaptive Variant Advantage
  7. 2026LVRPO: Language-Visual Alignment with GRPO for Multimodal Understanding and Generation
  8. 2025Listener-Rewarded Thinking in VLMs for Image Preferences