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.
arXiv:2608. 05131v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: On-Policy Self-Distillation (OPSD) has become a standard post-training approach for improving visual reasoning in multimodal large language models (MLLMs).
By Aniri, Jinhe Bi, Peng Liao, Zengjie Jin, Volker Tresp, Fei Shen, Yunpu Ma, Tat-Seng Chua
arXiv:2606. 19120v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) trains a model on its own rollouts and uses a frozen copy to provide dense token-level targets conditioned on a reference target.
By Sihan Wang, Xiyao Liu, Lianqing Liu, Zhi Han
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: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
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.
By Leyan Xue, Feng Xiong, Mingjun Ma, Changqing Zhang
arXiv:2606. 27527v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) possess broad conceptual knowledge acquired through large-scale text pretraining, yet their potential to supervise models in other modalities remains underexplored.
By Thomas Shih-Chao Liang, Zhuoran Yu, Yong Jae Lee
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.
By Kanghui Tian, Siyuan Liu, Ziang Yan, Sheng Xia, Shuai Dong, Yi Wang
arXiv:2607. 23125v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Post-training enables vision-language models (VLMs) to understand human instructions and perform various downstream tasks.
By Shuai Wang, Daoan Zhang, Zhe Tang, Hao Cheng, Jiaheng Wei
While vision-language models excel at general multimodal understanding, they still struggle with visual spatial planning. We attribute this to a perception-reasoning modality gap: visual planning requires models to infer latent state structures from pixels and then reason over the recovered structure to produce valid actions, whereas symbolic planning directly leverages explicit objects and constraints.
World models and multimodal large language models (MLLMs) provide complementary capabilities for predicting future outcomes from static visual observations. World models can generate concrete visual rollouts of possible futures, while MLLMs can reason abstractly over questions, goals, and rules.
arXiv:2604. 20329v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent works show that image and video generators exhibit zero-shot visual understanding behaviors, in a way reminiscent of how LLMs develop emergent capabilities of language understanding and reasoning from generative pretraining.
By Valentin Gabeur, Shangbang Long, Songyou Peng, Paul Voigtlaender, Shuyang Sun, Yanan Bao, Karen Truong, Zhicheng Wang, Wenlei Zhou, Jonathan T. Barron, Kyle Genova, Nithish Kannen, Sherry Ben, Yandong Li, Mandy Guo, Suhas Yogin, Yiming Gu, Huizhong Chen, Oliver Wang, Saining Xie, Howard Zhou, Kaiming He, Thomas Funkhouser, Jean-Baptiste Alayrac, Radu Soricut