Vision-language reinforcement learning (RL) has primarily focused on narrow domains (e.g. geometry or chart reasoning). This leaves broader training scenarios and resources underexplored, limiting the exploration and learning of Vision Language Models (VLMs) through RL. We find video games inherently provide rich visual elements and mechanics that are easy to verify. To fully use the multimodal and verifiable reward in video games, we propose Game-RL, constructing diverse game tasks for RL training to boost VLMs general reasoning ability. To obtain training data, we propose Code2Logic, a novel approach that adapts game code to synthesize game reasoning task data, thus obtaining the GameQA dataset of 30 games and 158 tasks with controllable difficulty gradation. Unexpectedly, RL training solely on GameQA enables multiple VLMs to achieve performance improvements across 7 diverse vision-language benchmarks, demonstrating the value of Game-RL for enhancing VLMs' general reasoning. Furthermore, this suggests that video games may serve as valuable scenarios and resources to boost general reasoning abilities. Our code, dataset and models are available at the GitHub repository.

Visual language models encounter challenges in computational efficiency and latency, primarily due to the substantial redundancy in the token representations of high-resolution images and videos. Current attention/similarity-based compression algorithms suffer from either position bias or class imbalance, leading to significant accuracy degradation. They also fail to generalize to shallow LLM layers, which exhibit weaker cross-modal interactions. T o address this, we extend token compression to the visual encoder through an effective iterative merging scheme that is orthogonal in spatial axes to accelerate the computation across the entire VLM. Furthermoer, we integrate a spectrum pruning unit into LLM through an attention/similarity-free low-pass filter, which gradually prunes redundant visual tokens and is fully compatible to modern FlashAttention. On this basis, we propose Lossless Ultimate Vision tokens Compression (LUVC) framework. LUVC systematically compresses visual tokens until complete elimination at the final layer of LLM, so that the high-dimensional visual features are gradually fused into the multimodal queries. The experiments show that LUVC achieves a 2 speedup inference in language model with negligible accuracy degradation, and the training-free characteristic enables immediate deployment across multiple VLMs.

Recent advancements in vision-language models (VLMs) have leveraged large language models (LLMs) to achieve performance on par with closed-source systems like GPT-4V. However, deploying these models in real-world scenarios, particularly on resource-constrained devices, remains challenging due to their substantial computational demands. This has spurred interest in distilling knowledge from large VLMs into smaller, more efficient counterparts. A key challenge arises here from the diversity of VLM architectures, which are built on different LLMs and employ varying token types-differing in vocabulary size, token splits, and token index ordering. To address this challenge of limitation to a specific VLM type, we present Generation after Recalibration (GenRecal), a general-purpose distillation framework for VLMs. GenRecal incorporates a Recalibrator that aligns and adapts feature representations between heterogeneous VLMs, enabling effective knowledge transfer across different types of VLMs. Through extensive experiments on multiple challenging benchmarks, we demonstrate that GenRecal significantly improves baseline performances, eventually outperforming large-scale open- and closed-source VLMs.

Color plays an important role in human perception and usually provides critical clues in visual reasoning. However, it is unclear whether and how vision-language models (VLMs) can perceive, understand, and leverage color as humans. This paper introduces ColorBench, an innovative benchmark meticulously crafted to assess the capabilities of VLMs in color understanding, including color perception, reasoning, and robustness. By curating a suite of diverse test scenarios, with grounding in real applications, ColorBench evaluates how these models perceive colors, infer meanings from color-based cues, and maintain consistent performance under varying color transformations. Through an extensive evaluation of 32 VLMs with varying language models and vision encoders, our paper reveals some undiscovered findings: (i) The scaling law (larger models are better) still holds on ColorBench, while the language model plays a more important role than the vision encoder. (ii) However, the performance gaps across models are relatively small, indicating that color understanding has been largely neglected by existing VLMs. (iii) CoT reasoning improves color understanding accuracies and robustness, though they are vision-centric tasks. (iv) Color clues are indeed leveraged by VLMs on ColorBench but they can also mislead models in some tasks. These findings highlight the critical limitations of current VLMs and underscore the need to enhance color comprehension. Our ColorBenchcan serve as a foundational tool for advancing the study of human-level color understanding of multimodal AI.

Coral reefs are vital yet vulnerable ecosystems that require continuous monitoring to support conservation. While coral reef images provide essential information in coral monitoring, interpreting such images remains challenging due to the need for domain expertise. Visual Question Answering (VQA), powered by Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs), has great potential in user-friendly interaction with coral reef images. However, applying VQA to coral imagery demands a dedicated dataset that addresses two key challenges: domain-specific annotations and multidimensional questions. In this work, we introduce CoralVQA, the first large-scale VQA dataset for coral reef analysis. It contains 12,805 real-world coral images from 67 coral genera collected from 3 oceans, along with 277,653 question-answer pairs that comprehensively assess ecological and health-related conditions. To construct this dataset, we develop a semi-automatic data construction pipeline in collaboration with marine biologists to ensure both scalability and professional-grade data quality. CoralVQA presents novel challenges and provides a comprehensive benchmark for studying vision-language reasoning in the context of coral reef images. By evaluating several state-of-the-art LVLMs, we reveal key limitations and opportunities. These insights form a foundation for future LVLM development, with a particular emphasis on supporting coral conservation efforts.

Humans can naturally identify, reason about, and explain anomalies in their environment. In computer vision, this long-standing challenge remains limited to industrial defects or unrealistic, synthetically generated anomalies, failing to capture the richness and unpredictability of real-world anomalies. In this work, we introduce CAVE, the first benchmark of real-world visual anomalies. CAVE supports three open-ended tasks: anomaly description, explanation, and justification; with fine-grained annotations for visual grounding and categorizing anomalies based on their visual manifestations, their complexity, severity, and commonness. These annotations draw inspiration from cognitive science research on how humans identify and resolve anomalies, providing a comprehensive framework for evaluating Vision-Language Models (VLMs) in detecting and understanding anomalies. We show that state-of-the-art VLMs struggle with visual anomaly perception and commonsense reasoning, even with advanced prompting strategies. By offering a realistic and cognitively grounded benchmark, CAVE serves as a valuable resource for advancing research in anomaly detection and commonsense reasoning in VLMs.

The increasing deployment of Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) raises safety concerns under potential malicious inputs. However, existing multimodal safety evaluations primarily focus on model vulnerabilities exposed by static image inputs, ignoring the temporal dynamics of video that may induce distinct safety risks. To bridge this gap, we introduce Video-SafetyBench, the first comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate the safety of LVLMs under video-text attacks. It comprises 2,264 video-text pairs spanning 48 fine-grained unsafe categories, each pairing a synthesized video with either a harmful query, which contains explicit malice, or a benign query, which appears harmless but triggers harmful behavior when interpreted alongside the video. To generate semantically accurate videos for safety evaluation, we design a controllable pipeline that decomposes video semantics into subject images (what is shown) and motion text (how it moves), which jointly guide the synthesis of query-relevant videos. To effectively evaluate uncertain or borderline harmful outputs, we propose RJScore, a novel LLM-based metric that incorporates the confidence of judge models and human-aligned decision threshold calibration. Extensive experiments show that benign-query video composition achieves average attack success rates of 67.2%, revealing consistent vulnerabilities to video-induced attacks. We believe Video-SafetyBench will catalyze future research into video-based safety evaluation and defense strategies.

Enhancing large vision-language models (LVLMs) with visual slow-thinking reasoning is crucial for solving complex multimodal tasks. However, since LVLMs are mainly trained with vision-language alignment, it is difficult to adopt on-policy reinforcement learning (RL) to develop the slow thinking ability because the rollout space is restricted by its initial abilities. Off-policy RL offers a way to go beyond the current policy, but directly distilling trajectories from external models may cause visual hallucinations due to mismatched visual perception abilities across models. To address these issues, this paper proposes SOPHIA, a simple and scalable Semi-Off-Policy RL for vision-language slow-tHInking reAsoning. SOPHIA builds a semi-off-policy behavior model by combining on-policy visual understanding from a trainable LVLM with off-policy slow-thinking reasoning from a language model, assigns outcome-based rewards to reasoning, and propagates visual rewards backward. Then LVLM learns slow-thinking reasoning ability from the obtained reasoning trajectories using propagated rewards via off-policy RL algorithms. Extensive experiments with InternVL2.5 and InternVL3.0 with 8B and 38B sizes show the effectiveness of SOPHIA. Notably, SOPHIA improves InternVL3.0-38B by 8.50% in average, reaching state-of-the-art performance among open-source LVLMs on multiple multimodal reasoning benchmarks, and even outperforms some closed-source models (e.g., GPT-4.1) on the challenging MathVision and OlympiadBench, achieving 49.08% and 49.95% pass@1 accuracy, respectively. Analysis shows SOPHIA outperforms supervised fine-tuning and direct on-policy RL methods, offering a better policy initialization for further on-policy training.

Recent strides in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have significantly advanced their performance in many reasoning tasks. However, Abstract Visual Reasoning (AVR) remains a critical challenge, primarily due to limitations in perceiving abstract graphics. To tackle this issue, we investigate the bottlenecks in current MLLMs and synthesize training data to improve their abstract visual perception. First, we propose VisuRiddles, a benchmark for AVR, featuring tasks meticulously constructed to assess models' reasoning capacities across five core dimensions and two high-level reasoning categories. Second, we introduce the Perceptual Riddle Synthesizer (PRS), an automated framework for generating riddles with fine-grained perceptual descriptions. PRS not only generates valuable training data for abstract graphics but also provides fine-grained perceptual description, crucially allowing for supervision over intermediate reasoning stages and thereby improving both training efficacy and model interpretability. Our extensive experimental results on VisuRiddles empirically validate that fine-grained visual perception is the principal bottleneck and our synthesis framework markedly enhances the performance of contemporary MLLMs on these challenging tasks. Our code and dataset will be released at https://github.com/yh-hust/VisuRiddles

Hallucination is a long-standing problem that has been actively investigated in Vision-Language Models (VLMs). Existing research commonly attributes hallucinations to technical limitations or sycophancy bias, where the latter means the models tend to generate incorrect answers to align with user expectations. However, these explanations primarily focus on technical or externally driven factors, and may have neglected the possibility that hallucination behaviours might mirror cognitive biases observed in human psychology. In this work, we introduce a psychological taxonomy, categorizing VLMs' cognitive biases that lead to hallucinations, including sycophancy, logical inconsistency, and a newly identified VLMs behaviour: appeal to authority. To systematically analyze these behaviours, we design AIpsych, a scalable benchmark that reveals psychological tendencies in model response patterns. Leveraging this benchmark, we investigate how variations in model architecture and parameter size influence model behaviour when responding to strategically manipulated questions. Our experiments reveal that as model size increases, VLMs exhibit stronger sycophantic tendencies but reduced authority bias, suggesting increasing competence but a potential erosion of response integrity. A human subject study further validates our hypotheses and highlights key behavioural differences between VLMs and human respondents. This work suggests a new perspective for understanding hallucination in VLMs and highlights the importance of integrating psychological principles into model evaluation. The benchmark and codes are tested and available in the anonymous link https://anonymous.4open.science/r/AIpsych-666.Figure 1: Left: a VLM exhibits sycophancy by favouring the questioner's options despite recognising it is a pink cup. Right: a human demonstrates authority bias by accepting the question's framing, also yielding the wrong answer. However, to distinguish between them, we will need to ask more questions. VLMs have made remarkable progress, achieving increasingly higher accuracy in visual reasoning tasks and enhancing real-world applications such as image captioning, visual question answering, and multimodal retrieval (Chen et al., 2023).