@inproceedings{chen-etal-2026-grpo,
    title = "{GRPO}-{CARE}: Consistency-Aware Reinforcement Learning for Multimodal Reasoning",
    author = "Chen, Yi  and
      Ge, Yuying  and
      Wang, Rui  and
      Ge, Yixiao  and
      Cheng, Junhao  and
      Shan, Ying  and
      Liu, Xihui",
    editor = "Liakata, Maria  and
      Moreira, Viviane P.  and
      Zhang, Jiajun  and
      Jurgens, David",
    booktitle = "Findings of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics: {ACL} 2026",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "San Diego, California, United States",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.findings-acl.210/",
    pages = "4305--4320",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-395-1",
    abstract = "Recent reinforcement learning (RL) approaches, such as outcome-supervised GRPO, have advanced reasoning in Large Language Models (LLMs), yet their adaptation to multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) remains underexplored. Progress has been further limited by the lack of evaluation settings that jointly test perception and reasoning under controlled generalization challenges. To enable such analysis, we present **SEED-Bench-R1**, a structured testbed featuring real-world video tasks and hierarchical evaluation across in-distribution, cross-environment, and cross-environment-task scenarios. Our analysis reveals that standard outcome-supervised GRPO often yields ``logical incoherence''{---}achieving correct answers through flawed reasoning{---}due to its exclusive focus on final-answer rewards and rigid KL penalties. To address this, we propose **GRPO-CARE**, a consistency-aware RL framework that eliminates KL penalties while introducing a two-tiered reward system: a base reward for accuracy and an adaptive bonus for consistency. This bonus, derived from a slowly evolving reference model through group-relative likelihood calibration, rewards reasoning paths that logically support the final answer without requiring expensive process supervision. Experiments on SEED-Bench-R1 show that GRPO-CARE consistently outperforms standard GRPO, achieving a 6.7{\%} gain on the hardest evaluation level and a 24.5{\%} increase in reasoning consistency. Moreover, models trained with GRPO-CARE transfer effectively to diverse video understanding and even language-only reasoning benchmarks, validating its robustness and generality."
}