SynthRL: Scaling Visual Reasoning with Verifiable Data Synthesis

Zijian Wu, Jinjie Ni, Xiangyan Liu, Zichen Liu, Hang Yan, Michael Qizhe Shieh


Abstract
Vision-language models (VLMs) trained via reinforcement learning with verifiable reward (RLVR) have shown notable progress in scaling test-time compute effectively. In this work, we investigate how synthesized RL data can further improve RLVR. To this end, we propose SynthRL—a scalable and guaranteed pipeline for automatic data scaling in reasoning-oriented RL training. SynthRL comprises three key stages: (1) selecting seed questions with appropriate distribution, (2) augmenting them into more challenging variants while preserving the original answers, and (3) a guaranteed verification stage that ensures near-perfect correctness and difficulty enhancement. Our empirical experiments demonstrate SynthRL’s scalability and effectiveness. When applied to the MMK12 dataset, SynthRL synthesizes over 3.3K additional verifiable, challenging questions from approximately 8K seed samples. Models trained with our synthesized data achieve consistent gains across five out-of-domain visual math reasoning benchmarks, with a significant improvement over baseline models trained on seed data alone. Notably, detailed analysis reveals that the gains are more pronounced on the most challenging evaluation samples, highlighting SynthRL’s effectiveness in eliciting deeper and more complex reasoning patterns.
Anthology ID:
2026.findings-acl.2107
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Month:
July
Year:
2026
Address:
San Diego, California, United States
Editors:
Maria Liakata, Viviane P. Moreira, Jiajun Zhang, David Jurgens
Venue:
Findings
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Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
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Pages:
42456–42476
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URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.findings-acl.2107/
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Cite (ACL):
Zijian Wu, Jinjie Ni, Xiangyan Liu, Zichen Liu, Hang Yan, and Michael Qizhe Shieh. 2026. SynthRL: Scaling Visual Reasoning with Verifiable Data Synthesis. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026, pages 42456–42476, San Diego, California, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
SynthRL: Scaling Visual Reasoning with Verifiable Data Synthesis (Wu et al., Findings 2026)
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