Unified multimodal models (UMMs) interleave generated ''visual thoughts'' (VTs) with text reasoning to improve spatial tasks. This incurs roughly an order-of-magnitude inference cost from multi-step diffusion.
arXiv:2606. 05718v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: On-policy distillation (OPD) improves reasoning by training a student on trajectories sampled from its own policy under supervision from a teacher.
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.
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.
UniEvo‑VL is a self‑evolving framework that lets multimodal models improve themselves by using their own critiques as privileged information. The method trains a single model to act as both teacher and student, minimizing divergence between their diffusion distributions over sampling trajectories. Experiments on Qwen‑image‑2512 show significant gains in image generation metrics, and stronger external critics further raise the improvement ceiling, though results vary across tasks.
Privileged on-policy distillation improves multimodal reasoning by allowing a teacher to evaluate student trajectories using rich, training-only visual evidence. Both models score these trajectories w...
arXiv:2608. 01263v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: On-policy distillation (OPD) samples trajectories from the current student policy and minimizes token-level divergence between student and teacher next-token distributions at prefixes along those trajectories.
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.
arXiv:2609.32353v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Visual token reduction is an effective way to accelerate multimodal large language models (MLLMs), but performance deteriorates rapidly under extre...
Modern multimodal models bring generation and understanding into a single unified system, which enables them to provide and learn from their own feedback. Motivated by this unified capacity, we introd...
arXiv:2607. 21556v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) is promising as it removes the external teacher required by on-policy distillation (OPD), yet it still needs asymmetric information between teacher and student to ensure that the self-teacher provides a stronger learning signal than the student.
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.