arxiv:2603.17024

HopChain: Multi-Hop Data Synthesis for Generalizable Vision-Language Reasoning

Published on Mar 17

· Submitted by

Shenzhi Wang on Mar 23

#2 Paper of the day

Qwen

Upvote

Authors:

Shenzhi Wang ,

Shixuan Liu ,

Abstract

HopChain is a scalable framework that generates multi-hop vision-language reasoning data to enhance VLMs' long-chain reasoning capabilities across diverse benchmarks.

AI-generated summary

VLMs show strong multimodal capabilities, but they still struggle with fine-grained vision-language reasoning. We find that long CoT reasoning exposes diverse failure modes, including perception, reasoning, knowledge, and hallucination errors, which can compound across intermediate steps. However, most existing vision-language data used for RLVR does not involve complex reasoning chains that rely on visual evidence throughout, leaving these weaknesses largely unexposed. We therefore propose HopChain, a scalable framework for synthesizing multi-hop vision-language reasoning data specifically for RLVR training of VLMs. Each synthesized multi-hop query forms a logically dependent chain of instance-grounded hops, where earlier hops establish the instances, sets, or conditions needed for later hops, while the final answer remains a specific, unambiguous number suitable for verifiable rewards. We add the multi-hop data synthesized by HopChain to the original RLVR data used to train Qwen3.5-35B-A3B and Qwen3.5-397B-A17B, and compare against RLVR on the original RLVR data alone across 24 benchmarks spanning STEM and Puzzle, General VQA, Text Recognition and Document Understanding, and Video Understanding. Although this multi-hop data is not synthesized to target any specific benchmark, adding it improves 20 out of 24 benchmarks on both models, indicating broad and generalizable gains. To demonstrate that full chained queries are important, we replace them with half-multi-hop or single-hop variants, reducing the 24-benchmark average accuracy by 5.3 and 7.0 points, respectively. Multi-hop training also strengthens long-CoT vision-language reasoning, with gains peaking at more than 50 accuracy points in the ultra-long-CoT regime. These experiments establish HopChain as an effective, scalable framework for synthesizing multi-hop data that improves generalizable vision-language reasoning.

View arXiv page View PDF Add to collection

Community

shenzhi-wang

Paper author Paper submitter about 18 hours ago

When training Qwen3.5, we kept asking ourselves:
🧐What kind of multimodal RLVR data actually leads to generalizable gains?
💡We believe the answer may not lie only in data tightly tailored to specific benchmarks, but also in OOD proxy tasks that train the foundational abilities behind long-chain visual reasoning.
The motivation is simple: VLMs are still unreliable in long-CoT settings. Small mistakes in perception, reasoning, knowledge use, or grounding can compound across intermediate steps and eventually lead to much larger final errors. However, much of today’s RLVR data still does not require complex reasoning chains grounded in visual evidence throughout, meaning these failure modes are often not sufficiently stressed during training.

🚀Excited to share our new work from Qwen and Tsinghua LeapLab:
HopChain: Multi-Hop Data Synthesis for Generalizable Vision-Language Reasoning
This is also one of the training task sources used in Qwen3.5 VL RLVR.

To study this question, we propose HopChain, a scalable framework for synthesizing multi-hop vision-language reasoning data for RLVR training. The key idea is to build each query as a chain of logically dependent hops: earlier hops establish the instances, sets, or conditions needed for later hops, while the model must repeatedly return to the image for fresh visual grounding along the way. At the same time, each query ends with a specific, unambiguous numerical answer, making it naturally suitable for verifiable rewards.
Concretely, HopChain combines two complementary structures: perception-level hops and instance-chain hops. We require each synthesized example to involve both, so the model cannot simply continue reasoning from language inertia. Instead, it is forced to keep grounding intermediate steps in the image, maintain cross-step dependencies, and control error accumulation across long reasoning trajectories. Our goal is not to mimic any specific downstream benchmark, but to strengthen the more fundamental abilities that long-CoT vision-language reasoning depends on.
We add HopChain-synthesized data into RLVR training for Qwen3.5-35B-A3B and Qwen3.5-397B-A17B, and evaluate on 24 benchmarks spanning diverse domains. Despite not being designed for any particular benchmark, HopChain improves 20 out of 24 benchmarks on both models, indicating broad and generalizable gains. We also find that full chained multi-hop queries are crucial: replacing them with half-multi-hop or single-hop variants reduces performance substantially. Most notably, the gains are especially strong on long-CoT and ultra-long-CoT vision-language reasoning, peaking at more than 50 accuracy points in the ultra-long-CoT regime.

Our main takeaway is simple:
beyond benchmark-aligned data, OOD proxy tasks that systematically train the core mechanics of long-chain visual reasoning can be a powerful and scalable source of RLVR supervision for VLMs — and can lead to more generalizable improvements.