SSL-R1: Self-Supervised Visual Reinforcement Post-Training for Multimodal Large Language Models

Abstract

Reinforcement learning (RL) with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has demonstrated the great potential of enhancing the reasoning abilities in multimodal large language models (MLLMs). However, the reliance on language-centric priors and expensive manual annotations prevents MLLMs' intrinsic visual understanding and scalable reward designs. In this work, we introduce SSL-R1, a generic self-supervised RL framework that derives verifiable rewards directly from images. To this end, we revisit self-supervised learning (SSL) in visual domains and reformulate widely-used SSL tasks into a set of verifiable visual puzzles for RL post-training, requiring neither human nor external model supervision. Training MLLMs on these tasks substantially improves their performance on multimodal understanding and reasoning benchmarks, highlighting the potential of leveraging vision-centric self-supervised tasks for MLLM post-training. We think this work will provide useful experience in devising effective self-supervised verifiable rewards to enable RL at scale. Project page: https://github.com/Jiahao000/SSL-R1.

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BibTeX

@article{xie2026ssl,
  title = {SSL-R1: Self-Supervised Visual Reinforcement Post-Training for Multimodal Large Language Models},
  author = {Jiahao Xie and Alessio Tonioni and Nathalie Rauschmayr and Federico Tombari and Bernt Schiele},
  year = {2026},
  abstract = {Reinforcement learning (RL) with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has demonstrated the great potential of enhancing the reasoning abilities in multimodal large language models (MLLMs). However, the reliance on language-centric priors and expensive manual annotations prevents MLLMs' intrinsic visual understanding and scalable reward designs. In this work, we introduce SSL-R1, a generic self-supervised RL framework that derives verifiable rewards directly from images. To this end, we revisit self-supervi},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.20705},
  keywords = {cs.CV},
  eprint = {2604.20705},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
}

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