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Rethinking Reinforcement Fine-Tuning in LVLM: Convergence, Reward Decomposition, and Generalization

arXiv:2604.19857v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement fine-tuning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for equipping large vision-language models (LVLMs) with ag

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arXiv:2604.19857v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement fine-tuning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for equipping large vision-language models (LVLMs) with agentic capabilities such as tool use and multi-step reasoning. Despite striking empirical successes, most notably Visual Agentic Reinforcement Fine-Tuning (Visual-ARFT), the theoretical underpinnings of this paradigm remain poorly understood. In particular, two critical questions lack rigorous answers: (i)how does the composite structure of verifiable rewards (format compliance, answer accuracy, tool executability) affect the convergence of Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), and (ii)why does training on a small set of tool-augmented tasks transfer to out-of-distribution domains? We address these gaps by introducing the Tool-Augmented Markov Decision Process (TA-MDP), a formal framework that models multimodal agentic decision-making with bounded-depth tool calls. Within this framework, we establish three main results. First, we prove that GRPO under composite verifiable rewards converges to a first-order stationary point at rate O(1/sqrt{T}) with explicit dependence on the number of reward components and group size (extbf{Theorem1}). Second, we derive a Reward Decomposition Theorem that bounds the sub-optimality gap between decomposed per-component optimization and joint optimization, providing a precise characterization of when reward decomposition is beneficial (extbf{Theorem2}). Third, we establish a PAC-Bayes generalization bound for tool-augmented policies that explains the strong out-of-distribution transfer observed in Visual-ARFT (extbf{Theorem~3}).

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Source: arXiv cs.CL | 2026-04-23

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