arXiv Computation and Language

Enhancing Multimodal RLVR with Pairwise Token Contrast and Adaptive Trajectory Confidence

The paper introduces PACE, a method that enhances multimodal reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) by using pairwise token contrast and adaptive trajectory confidence. Pairwise token contrast evaluates each token under four teacher views—combining correct/incorrect hints with image presence or absence—to isolate image-dependent support, while adaptive trajectory confidence normalizes teacher predictions to guide credit redistribution. Experiments demonstrate that PACE outperforms existing approaches on multiple multimodal reasoning benchmarks, achieving top accuracy across three backbones and the Qwen3‑VL‑8B‑Instruct model.

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 Computation and Language
Sep 4

Attend to Evidence: Evidence-Anchored Spatial Attention Supervision for Multimodal RLVR

The paper introduces EASE, a method that enhances multimodal reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) by adding visual‑evidence process supervision. EASE transforms annotated evidence regions into smoothed visual‑token targets and uses them to guide attention during RL training, but only on high‑reward trajectories. Experiments on Qwen2.5‑VL‑7B, Qwen3‑VL‑4B, and Qwen3‑VL‑8B show that EASE improves average scores over DAPO by 2.5 to 3.1 points across perception, hallucination, visual math, and multimodal reasoning benchmarks, and diagnostics confirm better alignment of visual attention with annotated evidence.

By Ruina Hu, Chen Wang, Lai Wei, Jionghao Bai, Bin Yu, Weiran Huang, Kai Wang, Yue Wang
arXiv Computer Vision
Oct 9

Look Back, Think Ahead: Visual Memory on Demand for Efficient Multimodal Reasoning

The paper introduces ViMoD, a lightweight framework that dynamically manages visual memory for multimodal large language models. ViMoD uses Deformable Aggregation of Region-wise Tokens (DART) to create content‑adaptive coarse representations linked to recoverable fine tokens, and Temporal Routing for Adaptive Contextual Evidence (TRACE) to anticipate and adjust evidence needs during reasoning. On the Qwen3‑VL‑4B model, ViMoD achieves superior performance across eight reasoning benchmarks with only a 20% visual token budget and minimal additional parameters.

By Yicheng Xue, Han Wu, Jufeng Yang, Minjing Dong, Xinghao Chen, Hanting Chen, Jianyuan Guo
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
Sep 16

OPD-Aha: From Linguistic Momentum to Visual Reflection in Multimodal On-Policy Distillation

OPD‑Aha is a privileged on‑policy distillation method that improves multimodal reasoning by reconstructing the distillation target from the teacher’s isolated visual preference instead of relying on fragile teacher‑student discrepancies. It suppresses continuations that contradict the image, encouraging students to interrupt flawed reasoning with reflection tokens such as "wait" and "actually." This approach leads to consistent improvements across fine‑grained perception and complex multimodal reasoning benchmarks.

By Chenhao Qiu, Dawei Li, Yechao Zhang, Lei Gong, Zhen Tan