VA-OPD improves VLM performance over standard on-policy distillation by reweighting rollouts and separating KL terms according to token-level visual advantage on math and visual benchmarks.
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Perception-Aware Policy Optimization for Multimodal Reasoning
Canonical reference. 80% of citing Pith papers cite this work as background.
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abstract
Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has proven to be a highly effective strategy for endowing Large Language Models (LLMs) with robust multi-step reasoning abilities. However, its design and optimizations remain tailored to purely textual domains, resulting in suboptimal performance when applied to multimodal reasoning tasks. In particular, we observe that a major source of error in current multimodal reasoning lies in the perception of visual inputs. To address this bottleneck, we propose PAPO, a novel policy gradient algorithm that encourages the model to learn to perceive while learning to reason. Specifically, we introduce the Implicit Perception Loss in the form of a KL divergence term, which can be seamlessly plugged into mainstream RLVR algorithms such as GRPO and DAPO. Notably, PAPO does not rely on additional data curation, reward models, or stronger teacher models. To further enhance the training stability of PAPO, we introduce the Double Entropy Loss, which effectively regularizes the new KL objective without compromising performance. Despite its simplicity, PAPO yields significant overall improvements of 4.4%-17.5% on diverse multimodal benchmarks. The improvements are more pronounced, approaching 8.0%-19.1%, on tasks with high vision dependency. We also observe a substantial reduction of 30.5% in perception errors, indicating improved perceptual capabilities with PAPO. Overall, our work introduces a deeper integration of perception-aware supervision into core learning objectives and lays the groundwork for a new RL framework that encourages visually grounded reasoning. Code and data will be made publicly available for research purposes. Project page: https://mikewangwzhl.github.io/PAPO.
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representative citing papers
RAPO uses an information-theoretic lower bound on visual gain to select high-entropy reflection anchors and optimizes a chain-masked KL surrogate, delivering gains over baselines on reasoning benchmarks across LVLM backbones.
SeePhys Pro benchmark reveals multimodal models degrade on physics reasoning as information transfers from text to images, with blind training improvements often stemming from textual cues rather than visual evidence.
V-Reflection introduces a think-then-look mechanism where MLLM latent states actively interrogate visual features via two-stage distillation from a box-guided teacher to a dynamic autoregressive student, narrowing the fine-grained perception gap on benchmarks.
Laser reformulates visual reasoning via Dynamic Windowed Alignment Learning to maintain latent superposition of global features, delivering 5.03% average gains over Monet and over 97% fewer inference tokens on six benchmarks.
VisReflect generates continuous latent visual reflections to emphasize relevant visual features and guide attention in LVLMs, yielding 4.1% gains on image benchmarks and 1.8% on video benchmarks with 44% less inference time than zooming methods.
CFPO is a counterfactual policy optimization method that regularizes RL policies in LVLMs by maximizing prediction discrepancy under suppressed visual cues, reporting 3-6% gains over baselines.
DyCo-RL improves four RLVR algorithms on seven visual and math reasoning benchmarks by assigning tokens visual or text roles via Fisher-Rao geodesic distance on attention and reweighting advantages by role-alignment score.
PTD-PO supplies step-wise token-distribution supervision to student policies via in-context privileged hints derived from spatial attention and intermediate reasoning, while keeping the student in an answer-free context and using Top-K Jensen-Shannon divergence for stable alignment.
Decomposes VLM distillation loss into orthogonal language and visual components and introduces Visual Gradient Steering to prioritize visual grounding over standard monolithic optimization.
ROMA improves MLLM robustness to seen and unseen visual corruptions by +2.3-2.4% over GRPO on seven reasoning benchmarks while matching clean accuracy.
MHPR is a multidimensional benchmark for LVLM human-centric perception-reasoning with C-RD, SFT-D, RL-D, T-D data tiers and ACVG pipeline, showing training gains on Qwen2.5-VL-7B to near-parity with larger models.
Visual replay module and adaptive depth scaling improve multimodal latent reasoning, reaching SOTA benchmarks with faster inference than explicit chain-of-thought methods.
MapTab introduces a 328-map, 196,800-query benchmark showing that current multimodal LLMs fall far short on multi-criteria route planning from maps-plus-tables.
Fine-R1 uses chain-of-thought supervised fine-tuning on a structured FGVR reasoning dataset plus triplet augmented policy optimization to outperform general MLLMs and CLIP models on seen and unseen fine-grained categories with 4-shot training.
Survey that defines agentic RL for LLMs via POMDPs, introduces a taxonomy of planning/tool-use/memory/reasoning capabilities and domains, and compiles open environments from over 500 papers.
RSICCLLM introduces a post-training framework with RSICI dataset, difference-aware supervised fine-tuning, and dual-negative preference optimization that claims to outperform much larger models on remote sensing image change captioning.
VIGIL is a counterfactual RL alignment method that reduces visual hallucinations in MLLMs by enforcing visual grounding via masked attention penalties, outperforming baselines with 25% of the data and showing emergent spatial capabilities.
V-Zero trains MLLMs for visual reasoning without answer labels by gating on-policy distillation trajectories using contrastive evidence from relevant versus negative image crops.
VeriEvol decouples prompt difficulty evolution from answer reliability verification to scale verified data for visual math reasoning, lifting benchmark accuracy from 35.42 to 54.73 and adding +3.88 in GRPO RL.
MathVis-Fine proposes a dataset with fine-grained visual annotations and dependency ratings plus a progressive two-stage training paradigm to align visual supervision with sample-specific necessity in multimodal mathematical reasoning.
MAPO is a dual-branch RL framework using modality relevance masks from cross-modal differential entropy and auxiliary attention losses to reduce late-stage modality collapse in audio reasoning models and improve benchmark results.
Q-DeepSight proposes a think-with-image multimodal CoT framework trained via RL with perceptual curriculum rewards and evidence gradient filtering to achieve SOTA IQA performance and enable training-free perceptual refinement in image generation.
The paper reviews conceptual foundations, methodological innovations, effective designs, critical challenges, and future directions for LLM-based Agentic Reinforcement Learning.
citing papers explorer
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Visual-Advantage On-Policy Distillation for Vision-Language Models
VA-OPD improves VLM performance over standard on-policy distillation by reweighting rollouts and separating KL terms according to token-level visual advantage on math and visual benchmarks.
-
Reflection Anchors for Propagation-Aware Visual Retention in Long-Chain Multimodal Reasoning
RAPO uses an information-theoretic lower bound on visual gain to select high-entropy reflection anchors and optimizes a chain-masked KL surrogate, delivering gains over baselines on reasoning benchmarks across LVLM backbones.
-
SeePhys Pro: Diagnosing Modality Transfer and Blind-Training Effects in Multimodal RLVR for Physics Reasoning
SeePhys Pro benchmark reveals multimodal models degrade on physics reasoning as information transfers from text to images, with blind training improvements often stemming from textual cues rather than visual evidence.
-
V-Reflection: Transforming MLLMs from Passive Observers to Active Interrogators
V-Reflection introduces a think-then-look mechanism where MLLM latent states actively interrogate visual features via two-stage distillation from a box-guided teacher to a dynamic autoregressive student, narrowing the fine-grained perception gap on benchmarks.
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Forest Before Trees: Latent Superposition for Efficient Visual Reasoning
Laser reformulates visual reasoning via Dynamic Windowed Alignment Learning to maintain latent superposition of global features, delivering 5.03% average gains over Monet and over 97% fewer inference tokens on six benchmarks.
-
VisReflect: Latent Visual Reflection for Fine-Grained Perception in Long Visual Context
VisReflect generates continuous latent visual reflections to emphasize relevant visual features and guide attention in LVLMs, yielding 4.1% gains on image benchmarks and 1.8% on video benchmarks with 44% less inference time than zooming methods.
-
CFPO: Counterfactual Policy Optimization for Multimodal Reasoning
CFPO is a counterfactual policy optimization method that regularizes RL policies in LVLMs by maximizing prediction discrepancy under suppressed visual cues, reporting 3-6% gains over baselines.
-
DyCo-RL: Dynamic Cross-Modal Coordination for Visual Reasoning
DyCo-RL improves four RLVR algorithms on seven visual and math reasoning benchmarks by assigning tokens visual or text roles via Fisher-Rao geodesic distance on attention and reweighting advantages by role-alignment score.
-
Teaching the Way, Not the Answer: Privileged Tutoring Distillation for Multimodal Policy Optimization
PTD-PO supplies step-wise token-distribution supervision to student policies via in-context privileged hints derived from spatial attention and intermediate reasoning, while keeping the student in an answer-free context and using Top-K Jensen-Shannon divergence for stable alignment.
-
Decomposed On-Policy Distillation for Vision-Language Reasoning: Steering Gradients for Visual Grounding
Decomposes VLM distillation loss into orthogonal language and visual components and introduces Visual Gradient Steering to prioritize visual grounding over standard monolithic optimization.
-
Reinforcing Multimodal Reasoning Against Visual Degradation
ROMA improves MLLM robustness to seen and unseen visual corruptions by +2.3-2.4% over GRPO on seven reasoning benchmarks while matching clean accuracy.
-
MHPR: Multidimensional Human Perception and Reasoning Benchmark for Large Vision-Languate Models
MHPR is a multidimensional benchmark for LVLM human-centric perception-reasoning with C-RD, SFT-D, RL-D, T-D data tiers and ACVG pipeline, showing training gains on Qwen2.5-VL-7B to near-parity with larger models.
-
Visual Enhanced Depth Scaling for Multimodal Latent Reasoning
Visual replay module and adaptive depth scaling improve multimodal latent reasoning, reaching SOTA benchmarks with faster inference than explicit chain-of-thought methods.
-
MapTab: A Diagnostic Benchmark for Long-Horizon Multi-Criteria Multimodal Reasoning on Heterogeneous Topological Graphs
MapTab introduces a 328-map, 196,800-query benchmark showing that current multimodal LLMs fall far short on multi-criteria route planning from maps-plus-tables.
-
Fine-R1: Make Multi-modal LLMs Excel in Fine-Grained Visual Recognition by Chain-of-Thought Reasoning
Fine-R1 uses chain-of-thought supervised fine-tuning on a structured FGVR reasoning dataset plus triplet augmented policy optimization to outperform general MLLMs and CLIP models on seen and unseen fine-grained categories with 4-shot training.
-
The Landscape of Agentic Reinforcement Learning for LLMs: A Survey
Survey that defines agentic RL for LLMs via POMDPs, introduces a taxonomy of planning/tool-use/memory/reasoning capabilities and domains, and compiles open environments from over 500 papers.
-
RSICCLLM: A Multimodal Large Language Model for Remote Sensing Image Change Captioning
RSICCLLM introduces a post-training framework with RSICI dataset, difference-aware supervised fine-tuning, and dual-negative preference optimization that claims to outperform much larger models on remote sensing image change captioning.
-
Staying VIGILant: Mitigating Visual Laziness via Counterfactual Visual Alignment in MLLMs
VIGIL is a counterfactual RL alignment method that reduces visual hallucinations in MLLMs by enforcing visual grounding via masked attention penalties, outperforming baselines with 25% of the data and showing emergent spatial capabilities.
-
V-Zero: Answer-Label-Free On-Policy Distillation with Contrastive Evidence Gating for Fine-Grained Visual Reasoning
V-Zero trains MLLMs for visual reasoning without answer labels by gating on-policy distillation trajectories using contrastive evidence from relevant versus negative image crops.
-
VeriEvol: Scaling Multimodal Mathematical Reasoning via Verifiable Evol-Instruct
VeriEvol decouples prompt difficulty evolution from answer reliability verification to scale verified data for visual math reasoning, lifting benchmark accuracy from 35.42 to 54.73 and adding +3.88 in GRPO RL.
-
MathVis-Fine: Aligning Visual Supervision with Necessity via Progressive Dependency-Guided Training for Multimodal Mathematical Reasoning
MathVis-Fine proposes a dataset with fine-grained visual annotations and dependency ratings plus a progressive two-stage training paradigm to align visual supervision with sample-specific necessity in multimodal mathematical reasoning.
-
Escape the Language Prior: Mitigating Late-Stage Modality Collapse in Audio Reasoning via Modality-Aware Policy Optimization
MAPO is a dual-branch RL framework using modality relevance masks from cross-modal differential entropy and auxiliary attention losses to reduce late-stage modality collapse in audio reasoning models and improve benchmark results.
-
Q-DeepSight: Incentivizing Thinking with Images for Image Quality Assessment and Refinement
Q-DeepSight proposes a think-with-image multimodal CoT framework trained via RL with perceptual curriculum rewards and evidence gradient filtering to achieve SOTA IQA performance and enable training-free perceptual refinement in image generation.
-
Rethinking Agentic Reinforcement Learning In Large Language Models
The paper reviews conceptual foundations, methodological innovations, effective designs, critical challenges, and future directions for LLM-based Agentic Reinforcement Learning.