The paper introduces Perception and Reasoning Attribution (PARA), a method that quantifies how much of a vision‑language model’s errors can be fixed by better perception versus stronger reasoning. PARA reveals that reinforcement learning (RL) benefits more from improving reasoning than perception, and motivates a new group‑relative attention distillation objective called GRAD. GRAD directly guides weaker rollouts toward the visual attention patterns of the best rollouts, consistently boosting performance across multiple model scales and benchmarks.
By Zeyuan Yang, Zhuohao Chen, Jiaben Chen, Yao Zhang, Maohao Shen, Chuang Gan
arXiv:2604. 14888v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent advances in vision language models (VLMs) offer reasoning capabilities, yet how these unfold and integrate visual and textual information remains unclear.
By Danae S\'anchez Villegas, Samuel Lewis-Lim, Nikolaos Aletras, Desmond Elliott
arXiv:2609.39168v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has improved the reasoning capabilities of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), yet existing...
By Zhihan Zhang, Lizi Liao
The paper introduces RECAP, a training method that enhances vision‑language models by incorporating temporally localized reactivation of image evidence—called visual revisit—into the reinforcement learning process. Visual revisit peaks are shown to predict correctness and causally improve performance; masking them hurts accuracy more than masking non‑peaks, while adding revisit peaks to failed reasoning partially restores correct answers. RECAP applies revisit‑conditioned advantage estimation, dynamic discounting, and gated value prediction to propagate final rewards through visually important reasoning steps, achieving significant gains on HallusionBench and other benchmarks without extra rewards or inference‑time changes.
By Zhaolu Kang, Tailong Luo, Chenxin Li, Yingjie He, Zhenyu Yu, Fengyu Zhou, Jiachen Qian, Lei Wei, Shuang Chen, Jiachen Li, Eric Hanchen Jiang, Rongchao Zhang, Zhengtao Yao, Hoi Leong Lee, Guansu Wang, Kaiyue Zhou
arXiv:2608. 03450v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reasoning in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) requires both fine-grained visual perception and rigorous logical deduction.
By Haoqian Kang, Liupeng Li, Kuofeng Gao, Jinpeng Wang, Zhenyu Lu, Bin Chen, Ke Chen, Yaowei Wang
SAVOR is a training framework for multimodal large language models that adds token and answer confidence to the output schema, optimises a Group Relative Policy Optimisation objective to penalise calibration error and poor abstention, and uses the learned confidence at inference to revisit visual evidence only when uncertain. Experiments on POPE, HallusionBench, AMBER, and MMHal-Bench with InternVL3-8B and Qwen3-VL-8B backbones show that SAVOR reduces hallucination while maintaining general capability on MME and MMBench, achieving lower Expected Calibration Error than DPO and decoding baselines.
By Zixiu Ding, Zilin Zhao, Yingjie He, Xinlang Kang, Guansu Wang, Wei Zhang
arXiv:2606. 29984v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement Learning (RL) is an important paradigm for improving the reasoning capabilities of Vision-Language Models (VLMs).
By Peng, Lee, Yin Zhang, Yanglin Zhang, Haonan Wu, Zishan Liu, Ruoxi Zang, Xin Zhu, Jiayin Zheng, Jian Yao, Zefeng Ji, Fei Ma
arXiv:2609.37656v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Large vision-language models (LVLMs) exhibit strong reasoning capabilities, yet the visual and textual evidence supporting the generated responses rema...
By Bowen Yuan, Danny Wang, Ruihong Qiu, Zijian Wang, Zi Huang
arXiv:2608. 15869v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multimodal large language models increasingly use visual chain-of-thought (Visual CoT) to reason about spatial, temporal, and embodied environments.
By Xiaoyu Zhu, Xinke Deng, Suresh Taddewadikar, Arnab Kumar Mondal, Zhongyu Jiang, Ian Fasel, Joerg Liebelt
arXiv:2608.22429v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) capable of thinking with images often rely on external tools for fine-grained perception. However, this relian...
By Changjiang Jiang, Qiannian Zhao, Lei Xin, Jinxiang Xie, Preslav Nakov, Zhuohan Xie
arXiv:2606. 26387v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) extend large language models (LLMs) with visual perception, enabling joint reasoning over images and text.
By Xi Xiao, Chen Liu, Chih-Ting Liao, Yunbei Zhang, Qizhen Lan, Yuxiang Wei, Lin Zhao, Janet Wang, Jianyang Gu, Muchao Ye, Tianyang Wang, Hao Xu
arXiv:2605. 14054v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Achieving robust perception-reasoning synergy is a central goal for advanced Vision-Language Models (VLMs).
By Haozhe Wang, Qixin Xu, Changpeng Wang, Taofeng Xue, Chong Peng, Wenhu Chen, Fangzhen Lin