aiqbench analysis
This research introduces SVRL, a reinforcement learning framework that enables multimodal agents to autonomously verify retrieved evidence within their reasoning traces, reducing dependency on external verifiers. By incorporating search-aware penalties and query-diversity rewards, the method improves tool efficiency and generalization in visual question answering tasks while lowering training costs for compact models.
Eliciting Self-Verification in Multimodal Reasoning Agents with Reinforcement Learning
arXiv:2609.08025v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reasoning agents increasingly rely on external tools such as web search to answer complex queries. Reinforcement learning (RL) finetuning algorithms such as GRPO have improved long-form reasoning in text-only language models, particularly for coding and mathematics. Reliable tool use in multimodal agents, however, remains challenging because models must interpret text and images while integrating noisy retrieved evidence, often under sparse outcome-level supervision without explicit verification signals. We present Self-Verification via Reinforcement Learning (SVRL), an RL-only finetuning framework that trains multimodal agents to verify and filter retrieved evidence within their own reasoning traces, reducing reliance on external verifiers at inference time. SVRL also introduces a search-aware penalty that discourages unnecessary tool calls and a query-diversity reward that encourages diverse, well-formed search queries, providing fine-grained feedback on when and what to search. Finetuning Qwen-2.5-VL-7B with SVRL on only 5{,}000 visual question answering examples yields consistent gains in multi-hop VQA generalization and tool efficiency across benchmarks. Overall, SVRL narrows the gap between compact agents and much larger proprietary models while requiring substantially lower training and inference cost.
Abstract:Reasoning agents increasingly rely on external tools such as web search to answer complex queries. Reinforcement learning (RL) finetuning algorithms such as GRPO have improved long-form reasoning in text-only language models, particularly for coding and mathematics. Reliable tool use in multimodal agents, however, remains challenging because models must interpret text and images while integrating noisy retrieved evidence, often under sparse outcome-level supervision without explicit verification signals. We present Self-Verification via Reinforcement Learning (SVRL), an RL-only finetuning framework that trains multimodal agents to verify and filter retrieved evidence within their own reasoning traces, reducing reliance on external verifiers at inference time. SVRL also introduces a search-aware penalty that discourages unnecessary tool calls and a query-diversity reward that encourages diverse, well-formed search queries, providing fine-grained feedback on when and what to search. Finetuning Qwen-2.5-VL-7B with SVRL on only 5{,}000 visual question answering examples yields consistent gains in multi-hop VQA generalization and tool efficiency across benchmarks. Overall, SVRL narrows the gap between compact agents and much larger proprietary models while requiring substantially lower training and inference cost.
To appear in ECCV 2026. 11 main pages. 7 figures
Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Computation and Language (cs.CL); Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)
arXiv:2609.08025 [cs.AI]
(or arXiv:2609.08025v1 [cs.AI] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.08025 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
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Full text under the publisher's open licence · 288 words