{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/sft-or-rl-an-early-investigation-into","title":"SFT or RL? An Early Investigation into Training R1-Like Reasoning Large Vision-Language Models","arxiv_id":"2504.11468","date":"2025-04-10","proceeding":null,"authors":["Hardy Chen","Haoqin Tu","Fali Wang","Hui Liu","Xianfeng Tang","Xinya Du","Yuyin Zhou","Cihang Xie"],"abstract":"This work revisits the dominant supervised fine-tuning (SFT) then reinforcement learning (RL) paradigm for training Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs), and reveals a key finding: SFT can significantly undermine subsequent RL by inducing ``pseudo reasoning paths'' imitated from expert models. While these paths may resemble the native reasoning paths of RL models, they often involve prolonged, hesitant, less informative steps, and incorrect reasoning. To systematically study this effect, we introduce VLAA-Thinking, a new multimodal dataset designed to support reasoning in LVLMs. Constructed via a six-step pipeline involving captioning, reasoning distillation, answer rewrite and verification, VLAA-Thinking comprises high-quality, step-by-step visual reasoning traces for SFT, along with a more challenging RL split from the same data source. Using this dataset, we conduct extensive experiments comparing SFT, RL and their combinations. Results show that while SFT helps models learn reasoning formats, it often locks aligned models into imitative, rigid reasoning modes that impede further learning. In contrast, building on the Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) with a novel mixed reward module integrating both perception and cognition signals, our RL approach fosters more genuine, adaptive reasoning behavior. Notably, our model VLAA-Thinker, based on Qwen2.5VL 3B, achieves top-1 performance on Open LMM Reasoning Leaderboard (https://huggingface.co/spaces/opencompass/Open_LMM_Reasoning_Leaderboard) among 4B scale LVLMs, surpassing the previous state-of-the-art by 1.8%. We hope our findings provide valuable insights in developing reasoning-capable LVLMs and can inform future research in this area.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.11468v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.11468v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"sft-or-rl-an-early-investigation-into","repo_url":"https://github.com/ucsc-vlaa/vlaa-thinking","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"Apache-2.0"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"reinforcement-learning-1","task_name":"Reinforcement Learning (RL)"},{"task_slug":"visual-reasoning","task_name":"Visual Reasoning"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"sft","method_name":"SFT"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":"https://syntology.ai/paper/2504.11468","atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2504.11468","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2504.11468"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-25T09:33:49+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. Samples come from repositories linked to the paper, official or community; repo_kind says which.","repos":[{"provenance":"external:paperswithcode_snapshot_2025-07-28","url":"https://github.com/ucsc-vlaa/vlaa-thinking","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"Apache-2.0"}}],"summary":{"unverified":1},"by_repo_kind":{"listed":{"samples":1,"ran":0,"repositories":1}},"repo_kind_vocabulary":{"official":"The archive marks this repository official for the paper","named_in_paper":"The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official","listed":"In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper","found_in_text":"Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted","community":"Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested"},"n_pointer_only_for_licence":0,"samples":[{"code_sha256_prefix":"be75f2abab1559f8","entry":"get_model_processor","repo":"ucsc-vlaa/vlaa-thinking","repo_kind":"listed","path":"inference.py","file_url":"https://github.com/ucsc-vlaa/vlaa-thinking/blob/HEAD/inference.py","link_basis":"harvester_set","language":"python","status":"unverified","verification_level":0,"contract_check":null,"metamorphic_tier":null,"behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"Apache-2.0","inline_ok":true,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"be75f2abab1559f8"}}]},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}