Trinity: Self-Evolving Vision-Language Models with a Self-Verifier
cs.AI
Submitted: 2026-10-03
Updated: 2026-10-03
Comments: NeurIPS'26 Workshop on Agentic AI for Biological Discovery (AgenticLS)
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
The gist: Self-evolving vision-language models (VLMs), a form of self-improvement in which a model generates its own training data from unlabeled images, are a promising route toward agents that expand their
Terminology
Abstract
Self-evolving vision-language models (VLMs), a form of self-improvement in which a model generates its own training data from unlabeled images, are a promising route toward agents that expand their reasoning capability in an unsupervised manner, without relying on ever-larger annotation budgets. Existing methods pair a Questioner that proposes problems with a Solver that answers them, but reward both roles mainly by agreement among sampled answers. Agreement is a weak proxy for truth: it cannot tell whether a question is grounded in the image, whether the proposed reference answer is right, or whether a confident majority is wrong in the same way. We present Trinity, in which one VLM plays three roles, Questioner, Solver, and Verifier, and the Verifier is a self-verifier: an exponential moving average (EMA) of the policy itself, requiring neither labels nor an external judge. The Verifier screens every generated question for image grounding and answer correctness before it becomes supervision, scores Solver reasoning against the image, and adjudicates disputes between the reference answer and a strong Solver consensus, correcting the reference and penalizing the Questioner when the consensus is right. Trained on images alone, Trinity improves Qwen3-VL-8B on mathematical visual reasoning and on science benchmarks with biology content, for example, +8.6 points on the biology split of SciVQR and +12.8 on MathVerse, and its reward dynamics behave as a healthy self-play curriculum should. These results suggest that a self-evolving multimodal agent can strengthen its scientific reasoning from unlabeled scientific images alone, with the model itself serving as the verifier.
Sources
- Qwen3-VL Technical Report
- Qwen2.5-VL Technical Report
- Gemma 4 Technical Report
- Active Zero: Self-Evolving Vision-Language Models through Active Environment Exploration
- R-Zero: Self-Evolving Reasoning LLM from Zero Data
- From Blind Spots to Gains: Diagnostic-Driven Iterative Training for Large Multimodal Models
- MM-Zero: Self-Evolving Multi-Model Vision Language Models From Zero Data
- Agent0-VL: Exploring Self-Evolving Agent for Tool-Integrated Vision-Language Reasoning
- Unified Generation and Self-Verification for Vision-Language Models via Advantage Decoupled Preference Optimization
- Vero: An Open RL Recipe for General Visual Reasoning
- DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Models
- EvoLMM: Self-Evolving Large Multimodal Models with Continuous Rewards
- V-Zero: Self-Improving Multimodal Reasoning with Zero Annotation
- Innovator-VL: A Multimodal Large Language Model for Scientific Discovery
- Absolute Zero: Reinforced Self-play Reasoning with Zero Data
- Group Sequence Policy Optimization
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