ReDiS: Reasoning-Diagnosis Self-Evolution for Multimodal Reasoning in Remote Sensing

Abstract

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown strong potential for remote sensing understanding, yet reliable reasoning remains challenging when tasks require fine-grained visual grounding and multi-step inference. Existing approaches typically rely on either costly pre-constructed reasoning trajectories or self-generated signals such as response consistency, which can reinforce shared errors and provide unreliable supervision. We introduce \textbf{Reasoning--Diagnosis Self-Evolution (ReDiS)}, a framework that separates reasoning exploration from candidate evaluation while allowing the two processes to evolve jointly. ReDiS instantiates two role-specific experts from a shared multimodal backbone: a \textbf{Reasoner} that explores diverse visual evidence--answer candidates and a \textbf{Diagnoser} that jointly evaluates the complete candidate set and provides credibility-aware feedback. As the Reasoner evolves, it exposes new candidate distributions and failure modes; the Diagnoser adapts to these changes and, in turn, reshapes the learning signal for subsequent exploration. To handle groups in which all sampled answers are incorrect and group-relative advantages vanish, we further introduce \textbf{Failure-Triggered Recovery (FTR)}, which provides minimal outcome-level correction without prescribing intermediate reasoning trajectories. Experiments on LHRS-Bench, MME-RS, and CHOICE show consistent improvements over Qwen3.5 backbones at 0.8B, 2B, and 4B scales. ReDiS improves category-averaged accuracy by 6.47 percentage points at 0.8B, while ReDiS-4B achieves the highest average performance among the compared remote sensing MLLMs.