arXiv AI

Stepwise Intrinsic Rewards for Reasoning in Large Language Models

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.

arXiv AI
Jul 17

Stop Thinking, Start Looking: Efficient Post-Training for Multimodal Document Question Answering via Reasoning-Free Alignment

arXiv:2607. 14682v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Efficient multimodal document question answering with explicit visual grounding, locating the precise document region that supports each answer remains an open challenge.

By Harikrishnan P M, Goutham Vignesh, Ganesh Parab, Saisubramaniam Gopalakrishnan, Vishal Vaddina, Varun V, Rohit Agrawal
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Aug 8

StructReward: Efficient Structured Process Rewards for Self-Correcting Multimodal Reasoning

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has emerged as an effective approach for improving multimodal reasoning. However, most existing methods evaluate an entire response using a binary reward based only on final-answer correctness, thereby discarding the supervision available in intermediate reasoning steps.

arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 7

Incentivizing Vision Language Models to Search for Long Video Question Answering

arXiv:2607. 02959v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We introduce VSeek, an agentic framework that transforms long-video question answering (LVQA) from a passive, single-pass perception task into a multi-turn retrieval process.

By Harsh Goel, S P Sharan, Sahil Shah, Minkyu Choi, Joungbin An, Kristen Grauman, Sandeep P. Chinchali
arXiv AI
Jun 8

Teaching the Way, Not the Answer: Privileged Tutoring Distillation for Multimodal Policy Optimization

arXiv:2606. 07000v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent post-training methods, particularly Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR), have significantly enhanced the reasoning ability of Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs).

By Shizhe Xiang, Ke An, Wenlong Yu, Yue Liu, Jian Luan, Pei Fu, Qilong Wang
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 27

V-Rubrics: Visual Faithfulness via Rubric-Based Reinforcement Learning

The paper introduces V‑Rubrics, a reinforcement‑learning framework that evaluates vision‑language model responses by breaking them into atomic propositions and scoring them on Visual Faithfulness, Reasoning Consistency, and Instruction Following. Using a fine‑tuned Qwen3‑VL‑8B‑Instruct model and a newly created 50K‑example V‑Rubrics dataset, the authors demonstrate that rubric‑based GRPO outperforms both a shared SFT baseline and an answer‑only GRPO, especially on knowledge‑oriented and visually grounded reasoning tasks.

By Shulin Tian, Minglun Li, Yuhao Dong, Hao Ding, Jiarui Yao, Haiwen Diao, Jingkang Yang, Hongyuan Zhu, Ziwei Liu
arXiv AI
Aug 3

Multimodal Reinforcement Learning with Adaptive Verifier for AI Agents

arXiv:2512. 03438v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Agentic reasoning models trained with multimodal reinforcement learning (MMRL) have become increasingly capable, yet they are almost universally optimized using sparse, outcome-based rewards computed based on the final answers.

By Reuben Tan, Baolin Peng, Zhengyuan Yang, Hao Cheng, Oier Mees, Theodore Zhao, Andrea Tupini, Isar Meijer, Qianhui Wu, Yuncong Yang, Lars Liden, Yu Gu, Sheng Zhang, Xiaodong Liu, Lijuan Wang, Marc Pollefeys, Yong Jae Lee, Jianfeng Gao
arXiv AI
1d ago

SIPO: Unifying Reinforcement Learning with On-Policy Self-Distillation

SIPO (Self‑Instructing Policy Optimization) unifies reinforcement learning with on‑policy self‑distillation by using a contrastive self‑teacher to generate token‑level credit signals. The method samples multiple rollouts per prompt, pairs each with a reference answer and its mistakes, and uses the difference in teacher log‑probabilities to provide dense feedback while still respecting the overall task reward. Experiments on reasoning and code‑generation benchmarks show that SIPO outperforms both RLVR and OPSD baselines without requiring an external teacher or extra generation steps.

By Zhenrui Yue, Huimin Zeng, Yueqi Wang, Yaokun Liu, Fengran Mo, Jinghan Zhang, Mung Yao Jia, Gyuseok Lee, Yang Zhang, Na Wei, Dong Wang