DeepEyes: Incentivizing "Thinking with Images" via Reinforcement Learning

ICLR 2026 Conference Submission11632 Authors

Keywords: Multimodal Large Language Models, Multimodal Reasoning, Reinforcement Learning

Abstract: Large Vision-Language Models excel at multimodal understanding but struggle to deeply integrate visual information into their predominantly text-based reasoning processes, a key challenge in mirroring human cognition. To address this, we introduce DeepEyes, a model that learns to ``think with images'', trained end-to-end with reinforcement learning and without pre-collected reasoning data for supervised fine-tuning (SFT) as a cold-start. Notably, this ability emerges natively, leveraging the model's own grounding capability as an intrinsic function rather than relying on external specialized models or APIs. We enable this capability through active perception, where the model learns to strategically ground its reasoning in visual information, guided by a tailored data selection and reward strategy. DeepEyes achieves significant performance gains on general perception and reasoning benchmarks and also demonstrates improvement in grounding, hallucination, and mathematical reasoning tasks. Interestingly, we observe the distinct evolution of active perception from initial exploration to efficient and accurate exploitation, and diverse thinking patterns that closely mirror human visual reasoning processes. Code is available at \url{https://anonymous.4open.science/r/DeepEyes-97FE/}.

Primary Area: foundation or frontier models, including LLMs

Submission Number: 11632