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.
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: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:2606. 13156v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) achieve strong singleshot spatial grounding, yet lack any mechanism to observe and correct their own predictions.
By Animesh Tripathy, Aswanth Krishnan
arXiv:2605. 06094v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Training VideoLLMs for complex reasoning remains challenging due to sparse sequence level rewards and the lack of fine grained credit assignment over long, temporally grounded reasoning trajectories.
By Hao Lin, Kunyang Lv, Xu Jiang, Jingqi Tian, Zhongjing Du, Jiayu Ding, Qiaoman Zhang, Hongbo Jin
arXiv:2608. 14144v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Visual on-policy distillation relies heavily on an informative teacher-student asymmetry, through either a larger, stronger teacher or privileged supervision, such as reference answers or ground-truth regions of interest.
By Yijiang Li, Yijun Liang, Yunjie Tian, Bingyang Wang, Ke Zhang, Zhenfei Yin, Di Fu, Philip Torr, Nuno Vasconcelos
The paper introduces Stepwise Marginal Information Gain (MIG), an intrinsic process reward that evaluates how each reasoning step of a large language model (LLM) or vision-language model (VLM) improves the likelihood of the reference answer. MIG rewards only new likelihood maxima, preventing duplicate credit, and is combined with outcome, format, and self‑distillation objectives to guide training. Experiments on eight benchmarks show that this method outperforms outcome‑only reinforcement learning and improves accuracy by up to 4.8 points over binary‑reward training, including a 12.6‑point gain on MathVerse and a 12.9‑point advantage on vision‑language transfer at 7B parameters.
By Xiangwei Wang, Wei Wang, Ken Chen, Nanduni Nimalsiri, Sachith Seneviratne, Saman Halgamuge
arXiv:2607. 10666v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Deploying AI-based visual inspection in manufacturing is hard because requirements change often, new defect types appear, and large labeled datasets are rarely available.
By Shubham Rao
Vision-language models (VLMs) have made substantial progress in long-video understanding, with standard backbone models typically answering questions from frames sampled across the full video. However...
arXiv:2602. 08503v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Self-correction is essential for solving complex reasoning problems in vision-language models (VLMs).
By Yi Ding, Ziliang Qiu, Bolian Li, Ruqi Zhang
arXiv:2605. 18740v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) still struggle with fine-grained visual understanding, where answers often depend on small but decisive evidence in the full image.
By Qianhao Yuan, Jie Lou, Xing Yu, Hongyu Lin, Le Sun, Xianpei Han, Yaojie Lu
The paper introduces a free, label‑free visual evidence signal that improves fine‑grained vision‑language reasoning. By selecting image crops that maximize the model’s answer distribution peak, the method locates answer‑bearing regions without training or annotations, boosting accuracy from 70 % to 85 %. The evidence gap also complements model confidence, enabling better correctness prediction and error flagging.
By Santi Ram Tiwari, Nihal Naik, Devbrat Pandey, Nishant Sinha