V-Gym: Enhancing Agentic Visual Reasoning via Skill-Data Co-Evolution
Organizations: State Key Laboratory of AI Safety, Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China · University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China
Abstract
Advances in multimodal understanding, reasoning, and tool use enable agents to tackle increasingly complex visual reasoning tasks. By distilling past execution experience into reusable skills, agents can transfer lessons from both successes and failures into future reasoning, reducing repeated errors and improving capabilities. However, limited experience may produce unreliable, poorly generalizable skills, while static datasets may lack the targeted and diverse practice needed for refinement. To address this gap, we introduce V-Gym, an autonomous framework that iteratively co-evolves procedural skills and multimodal practice data from execution trajectories. During skill evolution, V-Gym analyzes trajectories to distill and refine hierarchical skills, updating procedural guidance and applicability conditions while retaining an update only if it improves validation performance. During data evolution, V-Gym selects generation seeds by balancing data utility and exploration, then translates trajectory-identified bottlenecks into diverse, targeted practice data that expand the data bank after quality checks. The resulting practice outcomes feed back into subsequent skill updates, closing the loop for continual skill refinement. Experiments across diverse multimodal reasoning benchmarks show substantial improvements over baselines with multiple backbone models. Its evolved skills generalize across domains and models, while evolved data support more effective skill refinement, enabling autonomous diagnosis, targeted practice, and continual self-improvement.
Figures & tables
| Method | TIRBench | MMSearch-Plus | MMBrowseComp | Average | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Avg.@3 | Pass@3 | Avg.@3 | Pass@3 | Avg.@3 | Pass@3 | Avg.@3 | Pass@3 | |
| GPT-5.5 | ||||||||
| Baseline | 40.9 | 57.7 | 20.3 | 36.0 | 15.6 | 22.7 | 25.6 | 38.8 |
| Vanilla Tools | 63.1 | 73.8 | 34.0 | 49.0 | 33.3 | 46.0 | 43.5 | 56.3 |
| XSkill ( Jiang et al., 2026 ) | 64.7 | 77.4 | 34.3 | 54.0 | 36.2 | 54.7 | 45.1 | 62.0 |
| Ace-Skill ( Xiong et al., 2026 ) | 64.7 | 78.7 | 36.0 | 50.0 | 36.7 | 56.0 | 45.8 | 61.6 |
| Method | Target Benchmark | |
|---|---|---|
| Avg.@3 | Pass@3 | |
| TIRBench VisualToolBench | ||
| Vanilla Tools | 39.6 | 58.7 |
| V-Gym (Ours) | 46.2 ( 6.6) | 66.7 ( 8.0) |
| MMSearch-Plus AgentVista | ||
| Vanilla Tools | 31.3 | 41.6 |
Appendix figures & tables8 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
| Tool | Description | Main inputs |
|---|---|---|
| Shared by execution and generation | ||
| Web Search | Search the web via Serper API for titles, URLs, and text snippets. | query (str, required): query. max_results (int, optional): limit. |
| Image Search | Search related images via Serper image/Lens. ImgBB provides URLs for local reverse-image inputs. | search_type (str): text or reverse. query (str): text. image_url (str): reverse. max_results (int, optional). |
| Visit | Extract the main textual content of a webpage through the Jina Reader API. | url (str, required): page URL. goal (str): information to find. |
| Code Interpreter | Stateful Jupyter kernel for Python image processing (PIL/OpenCV), calculations, and data manipulation. | code (str, required): Python code. |
| Generation only | ||
| Dataset | Domain | Total | Train | Val. | Test | Sampling strategy |
| Visual Agentic Tool Use | ||||||
| TIRBench | Tool-Integrated Reasoning | 1,215 | 195 | 630 | 390 | Balanced random sampling across 13 task types. |
| VisualToolBench | Hybrid Tool Reasoning | 1,204 | – | – | 150 | Balanced random sampling of two single-turn types. |
| Multimodal Search | ||||||
| MMSearch-Plus | Multimodal Search | 311 | 100 | 110 | 100 | Random Sampling |
| MMBrowseComp | Multimodal Browsing | 400 | 100 | 150 | 150 | Random Sampling |
| Dataset | Shared tools | Generation only | |||||
| Code | Web | Image | Visit | Gen. | Edit | Capture | |
| Visual Agentic Tool Use | |||||||
| TIRBench | – | – | – | – | |||
| VisualToolBench | – | – | – | – | |||
| Multimodal Search | |||||||
| MMSearch-Plus | – | – | |||||
| Parameter | Value | Description |
| Models and execution settings | ||
| Solver model | Evaluated base model | Backbone used to solve tasks. |
| Judge model | GPT-5.5 (default) | Scores complete trajectories. |
| Embedding model | text-embedding-3-small | Similarity-based retrieval. |
| Test rollouts per instance | 3 | Independent test-time solutions. |
| Solver temperature | 0.6 | Practice, comparative validation, and test sampling. |
| Method | Mean SD (pp) | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| GPT-5.5 | Gemini-3.5-Flash | Qwen-3.7-Flash | |
| Baseline | 3.16 | 3.27 | 1.66 |
| Vanilla Tools | 1.29 | 2.19 | 2.32 |
| XSkill | 2.46 | — | — |
| Ace-Skill | 2.23 | — | — |
| SkillOPT | 2.09 | — | — |