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Vero: An Open RL Recipe for General Visual Reasoning

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What does it take to build a visual reasoner that works across charts, science, spatial understanding, and open-ended tasks? The strongest vision-language models (VLMs) suggest that broad visual reasoning is within reach, yet their closed data and reinforcement learning (RL) pipelines make their gains difficult to study, reproduce, or extend. We introduce Vero, a family of fully open VLMs that match or exceed existing open-weight models across diverse visual reasoning tasks. We scale RL data and rewards across six broad task categories, constructing Vero-600K, a 600K-sample dataset from 59 datasets, and designing task-routed rewards that handle heterogeneous answers. Across VeroEval, our 30-benchmark suite, Vero-600K outperforms existing RL datasets under controlled comparisons. Applied to five starting models, Vero variants gain 2.9-5.4 points on average over their initial models. Notably, Vero-Qwen3I-8B, trained on the Instruct model, surpasses Qwen3-VL-8B-Thinking by 3.8 points on average without additional distillation. Systematic ablations reveal that different task categories elicit distinct reasoning patterns and that broad gains depend on learning them jointly rather than in isolation. All data, code, and models are publicly available.

Gabriel Sarch, Linrong Cai, Qunzhong Wang, Haoyang Wu, Danqi Chen, Zhuang Liu• 2026

Related benchmarks

TaskDatasetResultRank
GUI GroundingScreenSpot Pro
Accuracy61.4
221
GUI GroundingScreenSpot--
169
Spatial ReasoningEmbSpatial--
131
Mathematical ReasoningMathVista (testmini)
Accuracy79.2
121
Fact-based Visual Question AnsweringFVQA
Accuracy27.9
67
Embodied Reasoning and Question AnsweringERQA
Score47.2
53
Chart Question AnsweringChartQA
Score91.6
48
Multimodal EvaluationMM-Vet v2
Score81.6
46
Instruction FollowingMM-IFEval
Score80.2
46
Chart Understanding and ReasoningCharXiv
Score63.5
37
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