EPISODE · Dec 19, 2025 · 25 MIN
Puzzle Curriculum GRPO for Vision-Centric Reasoning
from Daily Paper Cast · host Jingwen Liang, Gengyu Wang
🤗 Upvotes: 30 | cs.CV Authors: Ahmadreza Jeddi, Hakki Can Karaimer, Hue Nguyen, Zhongling Wang, Ke Zhao, Javad Rajabi, Ran Zhang, Raghav Goyal, Babak Taati, Radek Grzeszczuk Title: Puzzle Curriculum GRPO for Vision-Centric Reasoning Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2512.14944v1 Abstract: Recent reinforcement learning (RL) approaches like outcome-supervised GRPO have advanced chain-of-thought reasoning in Vision Language Models (VLMs), yet key issues linger: (i) reliance on costly and noisy hand-curated annotations or external verifiers; (ii) flat and sparse reward schemes in GRPO; and (iii) logical inconsistency between a chain's reasoning and its final answer. We present Puzzle Curriculum GRPO (PC-GRPO), a supervision-free recipe for RL with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) that strengthens visual reasoning in VLMs without annotations or external verifiers. PC-GRPO replaces labels with three self-supervised puzzle environments: PatchFit, Rotation (with binary rewards) and Jigsaw (with graded partial credit mitigating reward sparsity). To counter flat rewards and vanishing group-relative advantages, we introduce a difficulty-aware curriculum that dynamically weights samples and peaks at medium difficulty. We further monitor Reasoning-Answer Consistency (RAC) during post-training: mirroring reports for vanilla GRPO in LLMs, RAC typically rises early then degrades; our curriculum delays this decline, and consistency-enforcing reward schemes further boost RAC. RAC correlates with downstream accuracy. Across diverse benchmarks and on Qwen-7B and Qwen-3B backbones, PC-GRPO improves reasoning quality, training stability, and end-task accuracy, offering a practical path to scalable, verifiable, and interpretable RL post-training for VLMs.
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🤗 Upvotes: 30 | cs.CV Authors: Ahmadreza Jeddi, Hakki Can Karaimer, Hue Nguyen, Zhongling Wang, Ke Zhao, Javad Rajabi, Ran Zhang, Raghav Goyal, Babak Taati, Radek Grzeszczuk Title: Puzzle Curriculum GRPO for Vision-Centric Reasoning Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2512.14944v1 Abstract: Recent reinforcement learning (RL) approaches like outcome-supervised GRPO have advanced chain-of-thought reasoning in Vision Language Models (VLMs), yet key issues linger: (i) reliance on costly and noisy hand-curated annotations or external verifiers; (ii) flat and sparse reward schemes in GRPO; and (iii) logical inconsistency between a chain's reasoning and its final answer. We present Puzzle Curriculum GRPO (PC-GRPO), a supervision-free recipe for RL with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) that strengthens visual reasoning in VLMs without annotations or external verifiers. PC-GRPO replaces labels with three self-supervised puzzle environments: PatchFit, Rotation (with binary rewards) and Jigsaw (with graded partial credit mitigating reward sparsity). To counter flat rewards and vanishing group-relative advantages, we introduce a difficulty-aware curriculum that dynamically weights samples and peaks at medium difficulty. We further monitor Reasoning-Answer Consistency (RAC) during post-training: mirroring reports for vanilla GRPO in LLMs, RAC typically rises early then degrades; our curriculum delays this decline, and consistency-enforcing reward schemes further boost RAC. RAC correlates with downstream accuracy. Across diverse benchmarks and on Qwen-7B and Qwen-3B backbones, PC-GRPO improves reasoning quality, training stability, and end-task accuracy, offering a practical path to scalable, verifiable, and interpretable RL post-training for VLMs.
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Puzzle Curriculum GRPO for Vision-Centric Reasoning
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