DocR1: Evidence Page-Guided GRPO for Multi-Page Document Understanding

Abstract Understanding multi-page documents poses a significant challenge for multimodal large language models (MLLMs), as it requires fine-grained visual comprehension and multi-hop reasoning across pages. While prior work has explored reinforcement learning (RL) for enhancing advanced reasoning in MLLMs, its application to multi-page document understanding remains underexplored. In this paper, we introduce DocR1, an MLLM trained with a novel RL framework, Evidence Page-Guided GRPO (EviGRPO). EviGRPO incorporates an evidence-aware reward mechanism that promotes a coarse-to-fine reasoning strategy, guiding the model to first retrieve relevant pages before generating answers. To support this, we design a rigorous two-stage annotation pipeline and a curriculum learning strategy that enables effective training with limited supervision. Using this pipeline, we construct two datasets: EviBench, a high-quality training set with 4.8k examples, and ArxivFullQA, a benchmark with 8.6k QA examples over full scientific papers. Extensive experiments across a wide range of benchmarks demonstrate that DocR1 achieves state-of-the-art performance on multi-page tasks while maintaining strong results on single-page benchmarks.