SRPO: Enhancing Multimodal LLMReasoning via Reflection-Aware Reinforcement Learning

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown promising capabilities in reasoning tasks, yet still struggle significantly with complex problems requiring explicit self-reflection and self-correction, especially compared to their unimodal text-based counterparts. Existing reflection methods are simplistic and struggle to generate meaningful, instructive feedback, as the reasoning ability and knowledge limits of pre-trained models are largely fixed during initial training. To overcome these challenges, we propose multimodal Self-Reflection enhanced reasoning with Group Relative Policy Optimization SRPO, a two-stage reflection-aware reinforcement learning (RL) framework explicitly designed to enhance multimodal LLM reasoning. In the first stage, we construct a high-quality, reflection-focused dataset under the guidance of an advanced MLLM, which generates reflections based on initial responses to help the policy model to learn both reasoning and self-reflection. In the second stage, we introduce a novel reward mechanism within the GRPO framework that encourages concise and cognitively meaningful reflection while avoiding redundancy.