@inproceedings{li-etal-2026-self-evolving,
title = "Self-Evolving Vision Language Models for Structured Visual Understanding",
author = "Li, Zongxia and
Wu, Xiaomin and
Huang, Chengsong and
Du, Hongyang and
Wu, Xiyang and
Yu, Lantao and
He, Yicheng and
Liu, Zhichao and
Zhang, Jiarui and
Liu, Fuxiao and
Xie, Jing",
editor = "Lee, Hung-Yi and
Dev, Sunipa and
Li, Jessy and
Elliott, Desmond",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing",
month = oct,
year = "2026",
address = "Budapest, Hungary",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.1685/",
pages = "38332--38347",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-459-0",
abstract = "Self-evolving has emerged as a key paradigm for improving foundational models such as Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision Language Models (VLMs) with minimal human intervention. While recent approaches have demonstrated that LLM agents can self-evolve from scratch with little to no data, VLMs introduce an additional visual modality that typically requires at least some seed data, such as images, to bootstrap the self-evolution process. In this work, we present Multi-model Multi-modal Zero (MM-Zero), the first RL-based framework to achieve zero-data self-evolution for VLM reasoning. Moving beyond prior dual-role (Proposer and Solver) setups, MM-Zero introduces a multi-role self-evolving training framework comprising three specialized roles: a Proposer that generates structured visual concepts and formulates questions; a Coder that translates these concepts into executable code (e.g., Python, SVG) to render visual images; and a Solver that performs multimodal reasoning over the generated visual content. All three roles are initialized from the same base model and trained using Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), with carefully designed reward mechanisms that integrate execution feedback, visual verification, and difficulty balancing. Our experiments show that MM-Zero improves VLM reasoning performance across a wide range of multimodal benchmarks. MM-Zero establishes a scalable path toward self-evolving multi-model systems for multimodal models, extending the frontier of self-improvement beyond the conventional two-model paradigm."
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<abstract>Self-evolving has emerged as a key paradigm for improving foundational models such as Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision Language Models (VLMs) with minimal human intervention. While recent approaches have demonstrated that LLM agents can self-evolve from scratch with little to no data, VLMs introduce an additional visual modality that typically requires at least some seed data, such as images, to bootstrap the self-evolution process. In this work, we present Multi-model Multi-modal Zero (MM-Zero), the first RL-based framework to achieve zero-data self-evolution for VLM reasoning. Moving beyond prior dual-role (Proposer and Solver) setups, MM-Zero introduces a multi-role self-evolving training framework comprising three specialized roles: a Proposer that generates structured visual concepts and formulates questions; a Coder that translates these concepts into executable code (e.g., Python, SVG) to render visual images; and a Solver that performs multimodal reasoning over the generated visual content. All three roles are initialized from the same base model and trained using Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), with carefully designed reward mechanisms that integrate execution feedback, visual verification, and difficulty balancing. Our experiments show that MM-Zero improves VLM reasoning performance across a wide range of multimodal benchmarks. MM-Zero establishes a scalable path toward self-evolving multi-model systems for multimodal models, extending the frontier of self-improvement beyond the conventional two-model paradigm.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Self-Evolving Vision Language Models for Structured Visual Understanding
%A Li, Zongxia
%A Wu, Xiaomin
%A Huang, Chengsong
%A Du, Hongyang
%A Wu, Xiyang
%A Yu, Lantao
%A He, Yicheng
%A Liu, Zhichao
%A Zhang, Jiarui
%A Liu, Fuxiao
%A Xie, Jing
%Y Lee, Hung-Yi
%Y Dev, Sunipa
%Y Li, Jessy
%Y Elliott, Desmond
%S Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
%D 2026
%8 October
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Budapest, Hungary
%@ 979-8-89176-459-0
%F li-etal-2026-self-evolving
%X Self-evolving has emerged as a key paradigm for improving foundational models such as Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision Language Models (VLMs) with minimal human intervention. While recent approaches have demonstrated that LLM agents can self-evolve from scratch with little to no data, VLMs introduce an additional visual modality that typically requires at least some seed data, such as images, to bootstrap the self-evolution process. In this work, we present Multi-model Multi-modal Zero (MM-Zero), the first RL-based framework to achieve zero-data self-evolution for VLM reasoning. Moving beyond prior dual-role (Proposer and Solver) setups, MM-Zero introduces a multi-role self-evolving training framework comprising three specialized roles: a Proposer that generates structured visual concepts and formulates questions; a Coder that translates these concepts into executable code (e.g., Python, SVG) to render visual images; and a Solver that performs multimodal reasoning over the generated visual content. All three roles are initialized from the same base model and trained using Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), with carefully designed reward mechanisms that integrate execution feedback, visual verification, and difficulty balancing. Our experiments show that MM-Zero improves VLM reasoning performance across a wide range of multimodal benchmarks. MM-Zero establishes a scalable path toward self-evolving multi-model systems for multimodal models, extending the frontier of self-improvement beyond the conventional two-model paradigm.
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.1685/
%P 38332-38347
Markdown (Informal)
[Self-Evolving Vision Language Models for Structured Visual Understanding](https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.1685/) (Li et al., EMNLP 2026)
ACL
- Zongxia Li, Xiaomin Wu, Chengsong Huang, Hongyang Du, Xiyang Wu, Lantao Yu, Yicheng He, Zhichao Liu, Jiarui Zhang, Fuxiao Liu, and Jing Xie. 2026. Self-Evolving Vision Language Models for Structured Visual Understanding. In Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 38332–38347, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.