SynthRL: Scaling Visual Reasoning with Verifiable Data Synthesis

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Authors: Zijian Wu, Jinjie Ni, Xiangyan Liu, Z. Liu, Hang Yan, Michael Shieh
Cited by: 0

Abstract

Vision-language models (VLMs) trained via reinforcement learning with verifiable reward (RLVR) have shown notable progress in scaling test-time compute effectively.In this work, we investigate how synthesized RL data can further improve RLVR.To this end, we propose Syn-thRL-a scalable and guaranteed pipeline for automatic data scaling in reasoning-oriented RL training.SynthRL comprises three key stages: (1) selecting seed questions with appropriate distribution, (2) augmenting them into more challenging variants while preserving the original answers, and (3) a guaranteed verification stage that ensures near-perfect correctness and difficulty enhancement.Our empirical experiments demonstrate SynthRL's scalability and effectiveness.When applied to the MMK12 dataset, SynthRL synthesizes over 3.3K additional verifiable, challenging questions from approximately 8K seed samples.Models trained with our synthesized data achieve consistent gains across five outof-domain visual math reasoning benchmarks, with a significant improvement over baseline models trained on seed data alone.Notably, detailed analysis reveals that the gains are more pronounced on the most challenging evaluation samples, highlighting SynthRL's effectiveness in eliciting deeper and more complex reasoning patterns.

Fields of Study & Subjects

Multimodal Machine Learning Applications Human Pose and Action Recognition Video Analysis and Summarization

Publication details

Journal / source
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Publisher
Association for Computational Linguistics
Pages
42456–42476
Publication date
1 January 2026
Language
EN