Do MLLMs Really See It: Reinforcing Visual Attention in Multimodal LLMs
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The paper introduces Perception and Reasoning Attribution (PARA), a method that quantifies how much of a vision‑language model’s errors can be fixed by better perception versus stronger reasoning. PARA reveals that reinforcement learning (RL) benefits more from improving reasoning than perception, and motivates a new group‑relative attention distillation objective called GRAD. GRAD directly guides weaker rollouts toward the visual attention patterns of the best rollouts, consistently boosting performance across multiple model scales and benchmarks.
The paper introduces Selective Probability Mass Concentration (sPMC), a training framework that strengthens implicit visual grounding in multimodal large language models by selectively regularizing attention heads most responsive to visual evidence. sPMC treats attention over visual tokens as a spatial probability distribution and encourages mass to concentrate on semantically relevant regions using segmentation-derived priors, while leaving other heads unconstrained. Across six multimodal benchmarks, sPMC yields an average zero‑shot improvement of 3% and gains up to 11.3% for various models by regularizing only 3%–15% of their attention heads.
arXiv:2609.39168v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has improved the reasoning capabilities of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), yet existing...
The paper introduces LIRSeg, a method that replaces explicit Chain-of-Thought reasoning in multimodal large language models with a compact set of learnable latent tokens for reasoning segmentation. LIRSeg is trained in two stages—spatial alignment and GRPO—while employing extreme-advantage sampling, decoupled exploration-stability updates, and latent diversity amplification to enhance token informativeness. Experiments show that LIRSeg improves segmentation accuracy and reasoning efficiency, achieving significant gIoU gains over the VisionReasoner baseline and reducing reasoning tokens by about 16×.
arXiv:2608.22429v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) capable of thinking with images often rely on external tools for fine-grained perception. However, this relian...
arXiv:2608. 03450v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reasoning in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) requires both fine-grained visual perception and rigorous logical deduction.