mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

EasyVideoR1: Easier RL for Video Understanding

arXiv 2604.16893 ↗First posted 18 Apr 2026cs.CV cs.LGcited by 1

On the map: LLM reasoning → Multimodal reasoning

Abstract (arXiv)

Reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards (RLVR) has demonstrated remarkable effectiveness in improving the reasoning capabilities of large language models. As models evolve into natively multimodal architectures, extending RLVR to video understanding becomes increasingly important yet remains largely unexplored, due to the diversity of video task types, the computational overhead of repeatedly decoding and preprocessing high-dimensional visual inputs, and the difficulty of reproducible evaluation across numerous sensitive hyperparameters. Existing open-source RL training frameworks provide solid infrastructure for text and image scenarios but lack systematic optimizations tailored for video modality. In this work, we present EasyVideoR1, a complete and efficient reinforcement learning framework specifically designed for training large vision-language models on video understanding tasks. EasyVideoR1 makes the following contributions: (1) a full video RL training pipeline with offline preprocessing and tensor caching that eliminates redundant video decoding and yields a 1.47 × throughput improvement; (2) a comprehensive, task-aware reward system covering 11 distinct video and image problem types with unified routing and modular extension; (3) a mixed offline-online data training paradigm that combines curated high-quality trajectories with on-policy exploration, benefiting the learning of more challenging tasks; (4) joint image-video training with independently configurable pixel budgets, allowing the two modalities to mutually reinforce each other; and (5) an asynchronous multi-benchmark evaluation framework covering 22 mainstream video understanding benchmarks, with reproduced accuracy closely aligned with officially reported scores.

Key facts. Cited by 1 paper in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Multimodal reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning. Builds on 32 of its 43 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 18 Apr 2026.

Builds on

32 of 43 references.

Closest ancestors · 7

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2025OneThinker: All-in-one Reasoning Model for Image and Video2 Dec
  2. 2025VideoMathQA: Benchmarking Mathematical Reasoning via Multimodal Understanding in Videos5 Jun
  3. 2025VideoReasonBench: Can MLLMs Perform Vision-Centric Complex Video Reasoning?29 May
  4. 2025Video-Holmes: Can MLLM Think Like Holmes for Complex Video Reasoning?27 May
  5. 2025VCR-Bench: A Comprehensive Evaluation Framework for Video Chain-of-Thought Reasoning10 Apr
  6. 2025VideoChat-R1: Enhancing Spatio-Temporal Perception via Reinforcement Fine-Tuning9 Apr
  7. 2025Video-R1: Reinforcing Video Reasoning in MLLMs27 Mar

Other references · 25

  1. 2024DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Modelscited by 9,379
  2. 2023Efficient Memory Management for Large Language Model Serving with PagedAttentioncited by 5,944
  3. 2024Qwen2-VL: Enhancing Vision-Language Model's Perception of the World at Any Resolutioncited by 4,234
  4. 2024HybridFlow: A Flexible and Efficient RLHF Frameworkcited by 2,057
  5. 2024Video-MME: The First-Ever Comprehensive Evaluation Benchmark of Multi-modal LLMs in Video Analysiscited by 1,413
  6. 2024Thinking in Space: How Multimodal Large Language Models See, Remember, and Recall Spacescited by 611
  7. 2017TALL: Temporal Activity Localization via Language Querycited by 584
  8. 2024LVBench: An Extreme Long Video Understanding Benchmarkcited by 410
  9. 2024TempCompass: Do Video LLMs Really Understand Videos?cited by 363
  10. 2024SWIFT:A Scalable lightWeight Infrastructure for Fine-Tuningcited by 355
  11. 2025Learning to Reason under Off-Policy Guidancecited by 281
  12. 2025Video-MMMU: Evaluating Knowledge Acquisition from Multi-Discipline Professional Videoscited by 236
13 more
  1. 2026GDPO: Group reward-Decoupled Normalization Policy Optimization for Multi-reward RL Optimizationcited by 193
  2. 2020Where Does It Exist: Spatio-Temporal Video Grounding for Multi-Form Sentencescited by 118
  3. 2025Reinforcement Learning Optimization for Large-Scale Learning: An Efficient and User-Friendly Scaling Librarycited by 101
  4. 2025Learning What Reinforcement Learning Can't: Interleaved Online Fine-Tuning for Hardest Questionscited by 97
  5. 2025S-GRPO: Early Exit via Reinforcement Learning in Reasoning Modelscited by 87
  6. 2025StreamForest: Efficient Online Video Understanding with Persistent Event Memorycited by 78
  7. 2025MotionBench: Benchmarking and Improving Fine-grained Video Motion Understanding for Vision Language Modelscited by 70
  8. 2025Blending Supervised and Reinforcement Fine-Tuning with Prefix Samplingcited by 60
  9. 2026Video-MME-v2: Towards the Next Stage in Benchmarks for Comprehensive Video Understandingcited by 55
  10. 2025RLEP: Reinforcement Learning with Experience Replay for LLM Reasoningcited by 39
  11. 2025Test-time Prompt Interventioncited by 12
  12. 2025Weights-Rotated Preference Optimization for Large Language Modelscited by 3
  13. 2026System 1&2 Synergy via Dynamic Model Interpolationcited by 3

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Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 1.

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  1. 2025Reinforcement Learning Tuning for VideoLLMs: Reward Design and Data Efficiency
  2. 2026Video Models Can Reason with Verifiable Rewards
  3. 2025VideoSSR: Video Self-Supervised Reinforcement Learning
  4. 2026VideoTIR: Accurate Understanding for Long Videos with Efficient Tool-Integrated Reasoning
  5. 2025VLM-R1: A Stable and Generalizable R1-style Large Vision-Language Model
  6. 2025Scaling RL to Long Videos
  7. 2025ReWatch-R1: Boosting Complex Video Reasoning in Large Vision-Language Models through Agentic Data Synthesis
  8. 2026SSL-R1: Self-Supervised Visual Reinforcement Post-Training for Multimodal Large Language Models