Active Zero: Self-Evolving Vision-Language Models through Active Environment Exploration
Foundation Model Research Center, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所基础模型研究中心）；School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学人工智能学院）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；Wuhan AI Research（武汉人工智能研究所）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）
Self-play has enabled large language models to autonomously improve through self-generated challenges. However, existing self-play methods for vision-language models rely on passive interaction with static image collections, resulting in strong dependence on initial datasets and inefficient learning. Without the ability to actively seek visual data tailored to their evolving capabilities, agents waste computational effort on samples that are either trivial or beyond their current skill level. To address these limitations, we propose Active-Zero, a framework that shifts from passive interaction to active exploration of visual environments. Active-Zero employs three co-evolving agents: a Searcher that retrieves images from open-world repositories based on the model's capability frontier, a Questioner that synthesizes calibrated reasoning tasks, and a Solver refined through accuracy rewards. This closed loop enables self-scaffolding auto-curricula where the model autonomously constructs its learning trajectory. On Qwen2.5-VL-7B-Instruct across 12 benchmarks, Active-Zero achieves 53.97 average accuracy on reasoning tasks (5.7% improvement) and 59.77 on general understanding (3.9% improvement), consistently outperforming existing self-play baselines. These results highlight active exploration as a key ingredient for scalable and adaptive self-evolving vision-language systems.
MM-Zero: Self-Evolving Multi-Model Vision Language Models From Zero Data
University of Maryland（马里兰大学）；Brown University（布朗大学）；Washington University in St. Louis（圣路易斯华盛顿大学）；Adobe；University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）；University of Southern California（南加州大学）；NVIDIA
Vision-R1: Evolving Human-Free Alignment in Large Vision-Language Models via Vision-Guided Reinforcement Learning
Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Peng Cheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室）；Wuhan AI Research（武汉人工智能研究院）
VisPlay: Self-Evolving Vision-Language Models from Images
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）；Washington University in St. Louis（华盛顿大学圣路易斯分校）；University of Maryland（马里兰大学）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）
Self-Evolving Spatial Reasoning in Vision Language Models via Geometric Logic Consistency
Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory（上海人工智能实验室）；The City University of New York（纽约城市大学）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；Data61 CSIRO（Data61澳大利亚国家科学研究院）；University of New South Wales（新南威尔士大学）；Australian National University（澳大利亚国立大学）
Bidirectional Cross-Modal Knowledge Exploration for Video Recognition with Pre-trained Vision-Language Models
The University of Sydney（悉尼大学）；Baidu Inc.（百度公司）；Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Shanghai AI Laboratory（上海人工智能实验室）
Two Sides of the Same Coin: Co-Evolving Search for Cross-Task Attacks on Vision-Language Models
College of Computing and Data Science, Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学计算与数据科学学院）；Center for Frontier AI Research, Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR)（新加坡科技研究局前沿人工智能研究中心）；School of Electrical Engineering and Automation, Fuzhou University（福州大学电气工程与自动化学院）；ByteDance（字节跳动）
Guiding Medical Vision-Language Models with Explicit Visual Prompts: Framework Design and Comprehensive Exploration of Prompt Variations
Sichuan University Pittsburgh Institute（四川大学匹兹堡学院）；Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学）；Brown University（布朗大学）；Case Western Reserve University（凯斯西储大学）；Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）
VICO: Visual Environments Co-Evolving for Vision-Language Model Reasoning
Virginia Tech（弗吉尼亚理工大学）；Cisco（思科公司）；NVIDIA（英伟达公司）；UChicago（芝加哥大学）；Georgia Tech（佐治亚理工学院）；Abaka AI（Abaka人工智能公司）；UC Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）；UGA（佐治亚大学）；WashU（华盛顿大学）
Can Vision-Language Models Understand and Interpret Dynamic Gestures from Pedestrians? Pilot Datasets and Exploration Towards Instructive Nonverbal Commands for Cooperative Autonomous Vehicles
University of California Merced（加州大学默塞德分校）；Aalborg University（奥尔堡大学）
NavMorph: A Self-Evolving World Model for Vision-and-Language Navigation in Continuous Environments
State Key Laboratory of Multimodal Artificial Intelligence Systems (MAIS), Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CASIA)（多模态人工智能系统国家重点实验室（MAIS）、自动化研究所、中国科学院（CASIA））；School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences (UCAS)（人工智能学院、中国科学院大学（UCAS））；Peng Cheng Laboratory, ShenZhen, China（鹏城实验室、深圳中国）
TORE: Token Recycling in Vision Transformers for Efficient Active Visual Exploration
University of Warsaw（华沙大学）；Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science, Jagiellonian University（雅盖隆大学数学与计算机科学学院）；Ardigen SA（Ardigen SA公司）；Center for Molecular Medicine Cologne (CMMC), University of Cologne（科隆大学科隆分子医学中心）；IDEAS NCBR
AI can evolve without labels: self-evolving vision transformer for chest X-ray diagnosis through knowledge distillation
KAIST（韩国科学技术院）；Asan Medical Center（峨山医学中心）；University of Ulsan College of Medicine（蔚山大学医学院）；Yeungnam University（岭南大学）；Kyungpook National University（庆北国立大学）；Seoul National University（首尔国立大学）
Active Visual Information Gathering for Vision-Language Navigation
School of Computer Science, Beijing Institute of Technology（北京理工大学计算机学院）；ETH Zurich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）；Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院）；Inception Institute of Artificial Intelligence（起源人工智能研究院）
Learning Goal-Oriented Vision-and-Language Navigation with Self-Improving Demonstrations at Scale
Shanghai AI Laboratory（上海人工智能实验室）；UNC Chapel Hill（北卡罗来纳大学教堂山分校）；Fudan University（复旦大学）；The University of Adelaide（阿德莱德大学）；Nanjing University（南京大学）；Shanghai Jiaotong University（上海交通大学）
Lookahead Exploration with Neural Radiance Representation for Continuous Vision-Language Navigation
Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院计算技术研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；University of Wisconsin（威斯康星大学）；Indiana University（印第安纳大学）
Self-Evolving Agentic Image Restoration via Deliberate Planning and Intuitive Execution
Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院软件研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；School of Life Sciences, Tsinghua University（清华大学生命科学学院）；Intelligent Science & Technology Academy of CASIC（中国科学院 CASIC 智能科学与技术学院）
