The paper introduces ProCoRe, a contrastive reinforcement learning approach that improves visual grounding in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) for in-context learning (ICL). By generating captions for contrastive image pairs, decomposing them into propositions, and optimizing contrastive rewards, ProCoRe enhances alignment with relevant visual evidence without requiring ICL-formatted training data. The method achieves significant gains in multimodal ICL classification accuracy and captioning ROUGE-L over the Qwen-VL-3-8B baseline and outperforms state‑of‑the‑art ICL‑data‑dependent methods across multiple benchmarks. Additionally, the authors present PICL, a personalized multimodal ICL captioning benchmark designed to test genuine understanding of visual demonstrations.
By Minhyuk Seo, Minjae Lee, Chaeeun Lee, Wei Lin, Muhammad Jehanzeb Mirza, Tinne Tuytelaars, Jonghyun Choi
TwinICL is a procedurally generated benchmark that pairs matched text and image versions of tasks to enable controlled comparison of in‑context learning (ICL) across modalities. Experiments on six open‑weight models and 38 tasks show that multimodal ICL consistently underperforms text‑only ICL, with varying gaps by task family. Interventions targeting visual access, task framing, and reasoning can recover strong multimodal performance on a diagnostic subset, yet a modality gap remains even when explicit task instructions are provided, highlighting the dual role of demonstrations as context and evidence.
By Zihan Xue, Po-Yi Lu, Serhii Honcharenko, Zih-Ching Chen, Hsuan-Tien Lin, Nanyun Peng, I-Hung Hsu, Kuan-Hao Huang
The paper introduces a multimodal in‑context learning framework that uses contrastive demonstration modeling to align large language models’ responses with the required reasoning paths. By contrasting suboptimal and better responses and incorporating a response‑conditioned retrieval mechanism, the method explicitly guides models beyond surface imitation. Experiments on various multimodal tasks, especially visual question answering, show consistent performance gains.
By Mingbo Yang, Wenqiang Wang, Zhaolu Kang, Peng Chen, Yannan Chen, Sunshang Wang, Yan Xiao
arXiv:2606. 04434v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multimodal In-Context Learning (ICL) has emerged as a practical inference paradigm for Multimodal Large Language Models, where a small set of interleaved image-text In-Context Demonstrations (ICDs) conditions the model to solve new tasks.
By Niloufar Alipour Talemi, Hossein Kashiani, Fatemeh Afghah
arXiv:2609.15683v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: While In-Context Learning (ICL) enables models to adapt from exemplars without parameter updates, multimodal ICL remains largely underexplored, particu...
By Ziqian Fan, Shibo Xu, Junjie Li, Xiangyu Zhao, Shengyuan Ding, Yifan Yang, Zhenjie Yang, Haodong Duan, Yue Zhou, Zhihang Zhong, Xue Yang
The paper introduces AVA, a training‑free framework that improves interleaved multimodal in‑context learning for frozen large vision‑language models. AVA decomposes the interleaved context into per‑sample threads, selects influential demonstrations while removing redundancy, and calibrates consistency using a weak sibling model’s confidence. Across five vision‑language benchmarks, AVA raises performance by up to 2.4 points, narrows the visual performance gap on ScienceQA‑IMG, and remains robust even with 30% noisy demonstrations, all while keeping the LVLM frozen and adding only modest latency.
By Yigit Yilmaz, Elena Petrova, Mehmet Kaya, Lucia Rossi, Amir Rahman
arXiv:2610.16977v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Visual in-context learning (ICL) enables vision-language models (VLMs) to adapt at test time via demonstration examples, but its effectiveness depend...
By Shu Zhao, Tan Yu
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
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have made strong progress on visual question answering and image captioning, yet they still produce fluent claims about objects, attributes, or relations that...
arXiv:2610.02117v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: On-policy self-distillation has recently emerged as an effective approach for improving language-model reasoning by supervising students with a froze...
By Sophia Sirko-Galouchenko, Monika Wysoczanska, Andrei Bursuc, Nicolas Thome, Spyros Gidaris
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
arXiv:2610.07572v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: In-context learning (ICL) adapts frozen large multimodal models (LMMs) to new tasks from a few demonstrations (demos), but re-encodes them at every q...
By Xi Ding, Naichen Shi, Jiawei Zhang