arXiv Computer Vision By Zeyuan Yang, Zhuohao Chen, Jiaben Chen, Yao Zhang, Maohao Shen, Chuang Gan

Perception or Reasoning? Diagnosing and Tackling Reinforcement Learning Bottlenecks in VLMs

Read the original on arXiv Computer Vision →

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.

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