arXiv AI
Sep 17

Anchoring What Matters: A Dual-Level Learning Framework for Visually-Grounded Multimodal Reasoning

The paper introduces PIVOT, a dual-level learning framework designed to improve visually-grounded multimodal reasoning in large vision-language models. PIVOT employs a self‑calibrated experience replay mechanism to selectively reuse valuable visual reasoning trajectories, and a vision‑guided advantage allocation scheme that assigns extra rewards to tokens with strong visual support. Experiments on multiple benchmarks show that PIVOT enhances the multimodal reasoning performance of these models.

By Xinxin Song, Siyuan Li, Tingxiong Xiao, Jinli Suo
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 27

Boosting Reasoning in Large Multimodal Models via Activation Replay

The paper introduces Activation Replay, a training‑free method that improves reasoning in post‑trained large multimodal models (LMMs) by replaying low‑entropy activations from the base model’s input context. It shows that Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) shifts low‑entropy activations and that modulating these activations enhances reasoning across tasks such as mathematics, visual agents, and video reasoning. Experiments demonstrate that Activation Replay outperforms alternatives like high‑entropy replay or direct cross‑model intervention, boosting Pass@K and broadening RLVR’s reasoning coverage.

By Yun Xing, Xiaobin Hu, Qingdong He, Jiangning Zhang, Shuicheng Yan, Shijian Lu, Yu-Gang Jiang
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 Computer Vision
Aug 25

VIG: Visual Information Gain as a Reward Signal for Multimodal Chain-of-Thought Compression

The paper introduces VIG (Visual Information Gain), an information‑theoretic reward that evaluates each token in a multimodal chain‑of‑thought by measuring how much the image reduces its predictive uncertainty. VIG is computed online using two forward passes—one with and one without the image—eliminating the need for reference chains or external annotations. Experiments on six multimodal reasoning benchmarks and multiple Qwen3‑VL‑Thinking model sizes show that VIG consistently improves the accuracy–efficiency trade‑off, demonstrating that efficient multimodal reasoning arises from increasing visual information density rather than merely limiting chain length.

By Wen Luo, Xiaohan Yi, Xiaotao Huang, Liqun Huang