VL-Cogito: Progressive Curriculum Reinforcement Learning for Advanced Multimodal Reasoning

Ruifeng Yuan, Chenghao Xiao, Sicong Leng, Jianyu Wang, ll, Xu Weiwen, Hou Pong (Ken) Chan, Deli Zhao, Tingyang Xu, Zhongyu Wei, ZHANG HAO, Yu Rong

VL-Cogito: Progressive Curriculum Reinforcement Learning for Advanced Multimodal Reasoning: 47 upvotes on Hugging Face Daily Papers, #4 of 12 papers on 2025-07-31. Day-by-day upvote history.

Reinforcement learning has proven its effectiveness in enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models. Recent research efforts have progressively extended this paradigm to multimodal reasoning tasks. Due to the inherent complexity and diversity of multimodal tasks, especially in semantic content and problem formulations, existing models often exhibit unstable performance across various domains and difficulty levels. To address these limitations, we propose VL-Cogito, an advanced multimodal reasoning model trained via a novel multi-stage Progressive Curriculum Reinforcement Learning (PCuRL) framework. PCuRL systematically guides the model through tasks of gradually increasing difficulty, substantially improving its reasoning abilities across diverse multimodal contexts. The framework introduces two key innovations: (1) an online difficulty soft weighting mechanism, dynamically adjusting training difficulty across successive RL training stages; and (2) a dynamic length reward mechanism, which encourages the model to adaptively regulate its reasoning path length according to task complexity, thus balancing reasoning efficiency with correctness. Experimental evaluations demonstrate that VL-Cogito consistently matches or surpasses existing reasoning-oriented models across mainstream multimodal benchmarks spanning mathematics, science, logic, and general understanding, validating the effectiveness of our approach.

Paper page on Hugging Face · arXiv

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