Reasoning agents increasingly rely on external tools such as web search to answer complex queries. Reinforcement learning (RL) finetuning algorithms such as GRPO have improved long-form reasoning in text-only language models, particularly for coding and mathematics. Reliable tool use in multimodal agents, however, remains challenging because models must interpret text and images while integrating noisy retrieved evidence, often under sparse outcome-level supervision without explicit verification signals. We present Self-Verification via Reinforcement Learning (SVRL), an RL-only finetuning framework that trains multimodal agents to verify and filter retrieved evidence within their own reasoning traces, reducing reliance on external verifiers at inference time. SVRL also introduces a search-aware penalty that discourages unnecessary tool calls and a query-diversity reward that encourages diverse, well-formed search queries, providing fine-grained feedback on when and what to search. Finetuning Qwen-2.5-VL-7B with SVRL on only 5{,}000 visual question answering examples yields consistent gains in multi-hop VQA generalization and tool efficiency across benchmarks. Overall, SVRL narrows the gap between compact agents and much larger proprietary models while requiring substantially lower training and inference cost.
We introduce Self-Verified Reasoner (SVR-R1), a multi-turn RL framework that turns a model's own verification into a learning signal for multimodal reasoning. For each query, the model proposes an answer using the same weights, and issues a binary self-verdict (Yes/No). A 'No' triggers a second-chance rethink; a 'Yes,' or a turn cap, finalizes the output for computing the outcome-based reward. SVR-R1 is implemented with GRPO and an asynchronous multi-turn rollout framework and needs no external supervision or auxiliary critics. We evaluate SVR-R1 on vision-language reasoning benchmarks and show that it improves accuracy by a large margin over strong standard GRPO baselines. Training dynamics show decreasing reliance on verification-fewer verification turns, yet higher test accuracy-indicating that the gap between verification and generation narrows as the policy internalizes self-correction and chooses the most confident answer via our framework. SVR-R1 bridges the less explored intersection of inference-time self-refinement and RL training for VLMs, offering a simple yet effective recipe for bootstrapping multimodal reasoning. We will open-source \textbf{SVR-R1} to facilitate future research in VLMs.
We present SimpleSearch-VL, an efficient, reliable, and practical framework for multimodal agentic search. Its core idea is to improve the agent's own search-and-verification process rather than scaling data, tools, or auxiliary model components. For efficiency, Factorized Adaptive Rollout (FAR) improves sampling efficiency by forming more informative training groups while using redundant samples to mitigate long-tail latency and expose hard samples. For reliability, SimpleSearch-VL performs evidence-verified reasoning, explicitly using chain-of-thought verification to assess the relevance of retrieved visual and textual cues to the original context. For practicality, SimpleSearch-VL keeps a lightweight tool interface and performs webpage self-summary within the agent, requiring no additional external dependencies. With only 5K supervised tool-interleaved trajectories and 2K RL data, SimpleSearch-VL improves Qwen3-VL agentic baselines by 15.8 and 16.0 average points for the 8B and 30B-A3B variants, respectively. The SimpleSearch-VL-30B-A3B model further achieves performance competitive with agentic Gemini-3-Pro.
Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) improves multimodal reasoning by rewarding verifiable final answers. Yet answer-correct trajectories may still rely on incomplete derivations, weak evidence, or statements that contradict their conclusions. This gap between answer correctness and reasoning validity, which we call reasoning-answer inconsistency, motivates trajectory supervision in multimodal RL. We compare two main approaches: reward models (RMs), and Generative Rewards (GRs). RMs are efficient and help early in training, but their gains weaken as the policy distribution shifts; GRs improve performance, but may give unstable rewards and computationally expensive. We therefore propose Groupwise Ranking Reward, which ranks verifier-passed trajectories for the same prompt in one pass and redistributes reward accordingly. Groupwise comparison better separates stronger and weaker correct trajectories with lower judge overhead than GRs. Experiments show that RLVR aggravates reasoning-answer inconsistency, while trajectory supervision alleviates it. Groupwise Ranking Reward performs best overall, improving reliability-conditioned accuracy from 47.4% to 54.7% over RLVR.