Vision & Multimodal Aug 2025 · #3 most cited · 1.2K citations

InternVL3.5: Advancing Open-Source Multimodal Models in Versatility, Reasoning, and Efficiency

Weiyun Wang et al.

arXiv:2508.18265

In short

InternVL3.5 is an open family of multimodal models trained with a two-stage “cascade” of offline then online reinforcement learning to improve reasoning. A router that adapts image resolution and a deployment that splits the vision encoder and language model across GPUs make it about four times faster than its predecessor.

Why it matters

It narrows the gap between open and commercial multimodal models on reasoning and agent tasks.

Read first

The 3 Field Guide ideas this paper leans on.

Starting from scratch? The full route 23 ideas · basics first
  1. Machine Learning ✓ understood

    Building systems that learn patterns from data instead of following hand-written rules, getting better at a task as they see more examples.

  2. Neural Network ✓ understood

    A computational model inspired by biological neural networks, consisting of interconnected nodes (neurons) organized in layers that process information through weighted connections.

  3. Deep Learning ✓ understood

    A subset of machine learning that uses neural networks with multiple layers (deep neural networks) to learn hierarchical representations of data.

  4. Computer Vision ✓ understood

    The field of AI that gets computers to extract meaning from images and video: what is in them, where it is, and how it moves.

  5. Natural Language Processing ✓ understood

    The field of AI that lets computers read, interpret, translate and generate human language, from spam filters and search to chatbots.

  6. Token ✓ understood

    The basic unit of text that a language model processes, typically representing a word, subword, or character. Tokens are the fundamental building blocks for LLM input and output.

  7. Tokenization ✓ understood

    Splitting text into tokens, usually subword pieces, and mapping each to an integer ID so a language model can process it.

  8. Language Modeling ✓ understood

    Learning probability distributions over sequences of words to predict what comes next.

  9. Dataset ✓ understood

    A collection of data examples used for training, validating, or testing machine learning models.

  10. Training ✓ understood

    The process of fitting a model to data by repeatedly measuring how wrong its outputs are and adjusting its parameters to reduce that error.

  11. Unsupervised Learning ✓ understood

    Learning from unlabeled data to discover hidden patterns, structures, or relationships without explicit target outputs.

  12. Self-Supervised Learning ✓ understood

    Learning representations from unlabeled data by creating supervised tasks from the data itself (masked prediction, contrastive learning).

  13. Pre-training ✓ understood

    Training a model on a large dataset (often self-supervised) before fine-tuning on specific tasks, enabling transfer learning.

  14. Feature ✓ understood

    A single measurable property of an example, such as a house's floor area or how many links an email contains, used as an input to a model.

  15. Representation Learning ✓ understood

    Learning useful features or representations of data automatically, rather than hand-crafting them.

  16. Embedding ✓ understood

    A list of numbers (a vector) that represents a word, sentence, image or other item, learned so that similar items end up close together.

  17. Attention Mechanism ✓ understood

    A technique that lets a neural network weigh every part of its input when producing each output, focusing on the parts most relevant at that step.

  18. Transformer ✓ understood

    A neural network architecture, introduced in 2017, built from stacked self-attention and feed-forward layers; the basis of nearly every modern large language model.

  19. Large Language Model ✓ understood

    A neural network, almost always a transformer, trained on vast amounts of text to predict the next token, which lets it write, answer, summarize and follow instructions.

  20. Multimodal Model · read first ✓ understood

    Models processing multiple data types (text, images, audio) jointly, like GPT-4V, Gemini, or CLIP.

  21. Reinforcement Learning · read first ✓ understood

    Learning through interaction with an environment, receiving rewards or penalties to learn optimal behavior policies.

  22. Inference ✓ understood

    Running a trained model on new inputs to get predictions, with its weights frozen: the stage of a model's life that users actually interact with.

  23. Inference Latency · read first ✓ understood

    The time delay between submitting input and receiving output from a deployed model, critical for real-time applications.

In the frontier

Rank
#3 of 100
Citations
1.2K
as of Aug 9, 2026
Published
Aug 2025

Topics: Vision-language models , RL for reasoning , Efficiency and serving

Selection: 1kpapers.com by Together AI, most-cited as of Aug 9, 2026

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