Synthesizing Multimodal Verifiable Game Data to Boost VLMs' General Reasoning

Vision-language reinforcement learning (RL) has primarily focused on narrow domains (e.g. geometry or chart reasoning). This leaves broader training scenarios and resources underexplored, limiting the exploration and learning of Vision Language Models (VLMs) through RL. We find video games inherently provide rich visual elements and mechanics that are easy to verify. To fully use the multimodal and verifiable reward in video games, we propose Game-RL, constructing diverse game tasks for RL training to boost VLMs general reasoning ability. To obtain training data, we propose Code2Logic, a novel approach that adapts game code to synthesize game reasoning task data, thus obtaining the GameQA dataset of 30 games and 158 tasks with controllable difficulty gradation. Unexpectedly, training solely on GameQA would help VLMs obtain better out of domain generalization, demonstrating the value of Game-RL for enhancing VLMs general reasoning. Furthermore, this suggets that RL can lead to generalizable improvements in VLMs' reasoning abilities, and notably, video games may serve as valuable scenarios and resources to bring this generalization.