Visual-RFT: Visual Reinforcement Fine-Tuning

TL;DR

Visual-RFT extends reinforcement fine-tuning to visual tasks, leveraging large vision-language models and verifiable reward functions to improve performance and generalization in various image understanding benchmarks.

Contribution

This work introduces Visual-RFT, a novel reinforcement fine-tuning method for visual tasks using verifiable reward functions and policy optimization, expanding RFT applications beyond language models.

Findings

Improves accuracy by 24.3% in one-shot fine-grained image classification.

Outperforms baseline by 21.9 points in two-shot few-shot object detection on COCO.

Demonstrates strong generalization across multiple visual reasoning benchmarks.

Abstract

Reinforcement Fine-Tuning (RFT) in Large Reasoning Models like OpenAI o1 learns from feedback on its answers, which is especially useful in applications when fine-tuning data is scarce. Recent open-source work like DeepSeek-R1 demonstrates that reinforcement learning with verifiable reward is one key direction in reproducing o1. While the R1-style model has demonstrated success in language models, its application in multi-modal domains remains under-explored. This work introduces Visual Reinforcement Fine-Tuning (Visual-RFT), which further extends the application areas of RFT on visual tasks. Specifically, Visual-RFT first uses Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) to generate multiple responses containing reasoning tokens and final answers for each input, and then uses our proposed visual perception verifiable reward functions to update the model via the policy optimization algorithm such as Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). We design different verifiable reward functions for different perception tasks, such as the Intersection over Union (IoU) reward for object detection. Experimental results on fine-grained image classification, few-shot object detection, reasoning grounding, as well as open-vocabulary object detection benchmarks show the competitive performance and advanced generalization ability of Visual-RFT compared with Supervised Fine-tuning (SFT). For example, Visual-RFT improves accuracy by $24.3\%$ over the baseline in one-shot fine-grained image classification with around 100 samples. In few-shot object detection, Visual-RFT also exceeds the baseline by $21.9$ on COCO's two-shot setting and $15.4$ on LVIS. Our Visual-RFT represents a paradigm shift in fine-tuning LVLMs, offering a data-efficient, reward-driven approach that enhances reasoning and adaptability for domain-specific tasks.