arXiv Machine Learning

Seeing Before Reasoning: Decoupling Perception and Reasoning for Shortcut-Resilient Multimodal On-Policy Self-Distillation

arXiv:2606. 19120v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) trains a model on its own rollouts and uses a frozen copy to provide dense token-level targets conditioned on a reference target.

arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 28

Video-OPSD: Exploiting Privileged Visual Evidence for On-Policy Self-Distillation in Video Large Language Models

Video-OPSD introduces a post‑training framework for Video Large Language Models that leverages privileged visual evidence to enhance on‑policy self‑distillation. The method constructs a self‑teacher conditioned only on annotated evidence frames, while the student processes the full video, allowing the teacher to provide more focused supervision. Additionally, an evidence‑guided token optimization scheme weights distillation based on each token’s reliance on privileged evidence, improving perceptually grounded reasoning. Experiments demonstrate consistent gains over standard OPSD and comparable performance to GRPO with less training time.

By Ziyue Wang, Shiqi Huang, Weiwen Xu, Bihan Wen, Xudong Jiang
arXiv AI
Aug 5

CURV: Enhancing Chart Understanding Through Curriculum Visual Grounded Reasoning

arXiv:2608. 02833v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Chart question answering (CQA) requires multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to integrate visual comprehension with logical reasoning, yet current models struggle with accurate visual grounding and coherent reasoning chains.

By Xuehang Guo, Pingyue Zhang, Ruiyi Zhang, Zhenhailong Wang, Hanrui Lyu, Heng Ji, Tong Sun, Qingyun Wang, Manling Li
arXiv AI
1d ago

LEGO-OPD: Factorized Teacher Composition for Multimodal On-Policy Distillation

LEGO-OPD introduces a factorized teacher composition for multimodal on‑policy distillation, combining a Language Expert and a Grounding Expert into a single teacher distribution. By treating the language expert as a prior over tokens and the grounding expert as a visual likelihood that updates this prior, the method decouples language reasoning from visual grounding. Adaptive calibration further adjusts the influence of visual evidence at each decoding prefix, preventing over‑ or under‑supervision. Experiments with Qwen3 models demonstrate that LEGO‑OPD outperforms both single‑ and multi‑teacher baselines on multimodal and text‑only reasoning tasks, improving visual perception while preserving language reasoning.

By Jaeyun Shin, Hangeol Chang, Jong Chul Ye
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Aug 10

Perception Before Supervision: Self-Contained Visual Distillation from Counterfactual Blind Spots

Self-improvement for multimodal large language models (MLLMs) is typically driven by reward-based methods that provide only coarse scalar feedback. Distillation offers a richer alternative through dense token-level supervision, but in the visual domain it usually depends on privileged context constructed using external annotations and tools, or stronger models.