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G1: Bootstrapping Perception and Reasoning Abilities of Vision-Language Model via Reinforcement Learning

19 May 2025arXiv:2505.13426archive 2025-07-28

Liang Chen, Hongcheng Gao, Tianyu Liu, Zhiqi Huang, Flood Sung, Xinyu Zhou, Yuxin Wu, Baobao Chang

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) excel in many direct multimodal tasks but struggle to translate this prowess into effective decision-making within interactive, visually rich environments like games. This ``knowing-doing'' gap significantly limits their potential as autonomous agents, as leading VLMs often performing badly in simple games. To address this, we introduce VLM-Gym, a curated reinforcement learning (RL) environment featuring diverse visual games with unified interfaces and adjustable, compositional difficulty, specifically designed for scalable multi-game parallel training. Leveraging VLM-Gym, we train G0 models using pure RL-driven self-evolution, which demonstrate emergent perception and reasoning patterns. To further mitigate challenges arising from game diversity, we develop G1 models. G1 incorporates a perception-enhanced cold start prior to RL fine-tuning. Our resulting G1 models consistently surpass their teacher across all games and outperform leading proprietary models like Claude-3.7-Sonnet-Thinking. Systematic analysis reveals an intriguing finding: perception and reasoning abilities mutually bootstrap each other throughout the RL training process. Source code including VLM-Gym and RL training are released at https://github.com/chenllliang/G1 to foster future research in advancing VLMs as capable interactive agents.

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Language ModelingLanguage ModellingReinforcement Learning (RL)

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