arXiv Computer Vision

Reason in the Words You Speak: Idiolectal Paraphrasing Off-Policy Traces for Reasoning Distillation in VideoLLMs

The paper introduces Echo-GRPO, a method that rewrites privileged reasoning traces into a model’s own idiolect to align off‑policy supervision with the student policy’s vocabulary. By preserving semantics through Dual‑Reference Decoding, Echo‑GRPO mitigates gradient clipping on critical reasoning tokens and improves reasoning distillation. The approach is instantiated as VideoEcho‑R1 for video reasoning, yielding consistent gains across multiple multimodal LLM backbones and benchmarks, and it can be applied as a plug‑in to both RL and supervised fine‑tuning frameworks.

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
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 AI
Jun 30

Beyond Scaling Law: A Data-Efficient Distillation Framework for Reasoning

arXiv:2508. 09883v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable reasoning capabilities in tasks such as algorithmic coding and mathematical problem-solving.

By Xiaojun Wu, Xiaoguang Jiang, Huiyang Li, Jucai Zhai, Dengfeng Liu, Qiaobo Hao, Huang Liu, Zhiguo Yang, Ji Xie, Ninglun Gu, Jin Yang, Kailai Zhang, Yelun Bao, Jun Wang
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
arXiv AI
Aug 19

SOD: Step-wise On-policy Distillation for Small Language Model Agents

SOD: Step-wise On-policy Distillation for Small Language Model Agents proposes a new framework that adaptively reweights distillation strength at each reasoning step based on step-level divergence. This approach mitigates cascading errors in tool-integrated reasoning by attenuating misleading teacher signals in high-divergence regions while preserving dense guidance where student and teacher align. Experiments on math, science, and code benchmarks show up to 20.86% improvement over the second-best baseline, with a 0.6B student scoring 26.13% on AIME 2025.

By Qiyong Zhong, Mao Zheng, Mingyang Song, Xin Lin, Jie Sun, Houcheng Jiang, Xiang Wang, Junfeng Fang
arXiv AI
Sep 28

Can Linguistic Reasoning Vectors Enhance Multimodal Reasoning Ability?

The paper introduces LIFT, a lightweight vector‑intervention technique that transfers reasoning capability from a base large language model (LLM) to a vision‑language model (VLM) without retraining the VLM backbone. LIFT defines Reasoning Vectors as differences in hidden states between a reasoning path with an explicit trace and a solver path without it, and injects these vectors into the VLM’s language‑side activations. Experiments on two VLMs across six reasoning benchmarks show that vectors derived from the base LLM consistently outperform those derived from the aligned VLM, indicating that the base LLM is a more effective source for recovering degraded reasoning. "whyItMatters":"The study demonstrates that a simple, frozen‑backbone intervention can partially restore reasoning abilities in multimodal models, highlighting the value of leveraging the original language model’s reasoning power."

By Ziyi Wang, Li Li, Aolin Zhou, Yankun Shen, Chonghan Liu, Shuxia Lin, Xu Yang
arXiv AI
Jun 19

Reinforcement-aware Knowledge Distillation for LLM Reasoning

arXiv:2602. 22495v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) post-training has recently driven major gains in long chain-of-thought reasoning large language models (LLMs), but the high inference cost of such models motivates distillation into smaller students.

By Zhaoyang Zhang, Shuli Jiang, Yantao Shen, Yuting Zhang, Dhananjay Ram, Shuo Yang, Zhuowen Tu, Wei Xia, Stefano Soatto