Same Reward, Different Skills: When Multimodal RL Learns to Look

Excerpt

arXiv:2610.01908v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) improves vision-language benchmark scores even without visual information during training. With images at test, blind-trained models recover roughly half of the real-image gain at 3B and nearly four fifths at 7B. Prolonged real-image training can erode grounding while benchmark gains persist. Both findings expose the same gap: an image in the prompt is not an image in the learning signal. Our de