MMR1: Enhancing Multimodal Reasoning with Variance-Aware Sampling

Sicong Leng, Jing Wang, Jiaxi Li, Hao Zhang, Zhiqiang Hu, Boqiang Zhang, Yuming Jiang, Hang Zhang, Xin Li, Deli Zhao, Wei Lu, Yu Rong, Aixin Sun, Shijian Lu; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) Findings, 2026, pp. 9075-9087

Large multimodal reasoning models have achieved rapid progress, but their advancement is constrained by two major limitations: the absence of open, large-scale, high-quality long chain-of-thought (CoT) data, and the instability of reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms in post-training. Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), the standard framework for RL fine-tuning, is prone to gradient vanishing when reward variance is low, which weakens optimization signals and impairs convergence.This work makes three contributions: (1) We propose Variance-Aware Sampling (VAS), a data selection strategy guided by Variance Promotion Score (VPS) that combines outcome variance and trajectory diversity to promote reward variance and stabilize policy optimization. (2) We release large-scale, carefully curated resources containing ~1.6M long CoT cold-start data and ~15k RL QA pairs, designed to ensure quality, difficulty, and diversity, along with a fully reproducible end-to-end training codebase. (3) We open-source a family of multimodal reasoning models in multiple scales, establishing standardized baselines for the community.Experiments across mathematical and logical reasoning benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of both the curated data and the proposed VAS. Comprehensive ablation studies and analyses provide further insight into the contributions of each component. In addition, we theoretically establish that reward variance lower-bounds the expected policy gradient magnitude, with VAS serving as a practical mechanism to realize this guarantee. All codes, data, and checkpoints will be released.