MM-Doc-R1: Training Agents for Long Document Visual Question Answering through Multi-turn Reinforcement Learning

ACL ARR 2026 January Submission3497 Authors

Keywords: DocumentVQA, Reinforcement Learning

Abstract: Conventional Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems often struggle with complex multi-hop queries over long documents due to their single-pass retrieval. We introduce **MM-Doc-R1**, a novel framework that employs an agentic, vision-aware workflow to address long document visual question answering through iterative information discovery and synthesis. To incentivize the information seeking capabilities of our agents, we propose **Similarity-based Policy Optimization (SPO)**, addressing baseline estimation bias in existing multi-turn reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms like GRPO. Our core insight is that in multi-turn RL, the more semantically similar two trajectories are, the more accurate their shared baseline estimation becomes. Leveraging this, SPO calculates a more precise baseline by similarity-weighted averaging of rewards across multiple trajectories, unlike GRPO which inappropriately applies the initial state's baseline to all intermediate states. This provides a more stable and accurate learning signal for our agents, leading to superior training performance that surpasses GRPO. Our experiments on the MMLongbench-Doc benchmark show that **MM-Doc-R1** outperforms previous baselines by **10.4%**. Furthermore, **SPO** demonstrates superior performance over **GRPO**, boosting results by **5.0%** with Qwen3-8B and **6.1%** with Qwen3-4B. These results highlight the effectiveness of our integrated framework and novel training algorithm in advancing the state-of-the-art for complex, long-document visual question answering.

Paper Type: Long

Research Area: AI/LLM Agents

Research Area Keywords: LLM/AI agents, Reinforcement learning, Document-level extraction

Contribution Types: NLP engineering experiment

Languages Studied: English

Submission Number: 3497