SATORI-R1: Incentivizing Multimodal Reasoning through Explicit Visual Anchoring

Understand

DeepSeek-R1 has demonstrated powerful reasoning capabilities in the text domain through stable reinforcement learning (RL).

• Recently, in the multimodal domain, works have begun to directly apply RL to generate R1-like free-form reasoning for Visual Question Answering (VQA) tasks.
• However, multimodal tasks share an intrinsically different nature from textual tasks, which heavily rely on the understanding of the input image to solve the problem.
• Therefore, such free-form reasoning faces two critical limitations in the VQA task: (1) Extended reasoning chains diffuse visual focus away from task-critical regions, degrading answer accuracy.