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Post-training of vision-language models improves reasoning more than perception because of token imbalance in SFT and reward coupling in RL.

2026-06-29 07:36 UTC pith:3LOHOJXS

load-bearing objection The paper gives a clean diagnostic for why post-training helps reasoning more than perception in VLMs and shows workable fixes on synthetic tasks. the 1 major comments →

arxiv 2605.29496 v1 pith:3LOHOJXS submitted 2026-05-28 cs.CL cs.CV

On Asymmetric Optimization of Reasoning and Perception in Vision-Language Model Post-Training

Xueqing Wu , Yu-Chi Lin , Kai-Wei Chang , Nanyun Peng This is my paper
classification cs.CL cs.CV
keywords vision-language modelspost-trainingperception-reasoning asymmetrysupervised fine-tuningreinforcement learningchain-of-thoughttoken imbalancereward coupling
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved

The pith

A machine-rendered reading of the paper's core claim, the machinery that carries it, and where it could break.

The paper sets out to explain why post-training on vision-language models lifts reasoning performance much more than perceptual performance, leaving a bottleneck for tasks that require both. It builds a diagnostic framework of two synthetic tasks that isolate the two abilities and tracks how each training stage affects them separately. The analysis shows the imbalance has different roots in supervised fine-tuning versus reinforcement learning. Targeted changes to the loss weights or the reward signal reduce the gap and raise combined accuracy.

Core claim

Post-training improves reasoning more substantially than perception. For supervised fine-tuning this stems from token imbalance in chain-of-thought supervision, where perception occupies fewer tokens and receives a weaker training signal. Dynamically reweighting the loss mitigates this imbalance and boosts end-to-end performance by up to 18.2. For reinforcement learning the asymmetry arises from reward coupling, where outcome rewards correlate more strongly with reasoning than with perception. Adding a perception-aware reward alleviates the imbalance and improves end-to-end accuracy by up to 6.0; even a reliable surrogate reward yields gains of 3.2 points.

What carries the argument

A controlled diagnostic framework built from two synthetic tasks that separate perception from reasoning.

Load-bearing premise

The two synthetic tasks truly isolate perception from reasoning without introducing other factors that drive the observed asymmetry.

What would settle it

If reweighting the loss in SFT or adding a perception-aware reward in RL fails to close the performance gap on the synthetic tasks while leaving reasoning gains intact, the diagnosed mechanisms would be refuted.

Watch this falsifier — get emailed when new claim-graph text bears on it.

Editorial analysis

A structured set of objections, weighed in public.

Desk editor's note, referee report, simulated authors' rebuttal, and a circularity audit.

Referee Report

1 major / 2 minor

Summary. The paper introduces a controlled diagnostic framework with two synthetic tasks designed to disentangle perception from reasoning in vision-language models. It reports a consistent perception-reasoning asymmetry under post-training: SFT improves reasoning more due to token imbalance in chain-of-thought supervision, while RL does so due to reward coupling with outcome signals. Interventions (dynamic loss reweighting for SFT; perception-aware rewards for RL, including a surrogate) are claimed to close the gap and improve end-to-end accuracy by up to 18.2, 6.0, and 3.2 points.

Significance. If the diagnostic tasks isolate the factors as claimed, the work supplies a mechanistic account of why perception lags reasoning in VLM post-training and supplies concrete, paradigm-specific fixes. The controlled synthetic setup and the SFT-vs-RL distinction are methodological strengths that could inform future training recipes.

major comments (1)
  1. [§3] §3 (Synthetic Tasks): The central attribution of the asymmetry to token imbalance (SFT) or reward coupling (RL) rests on the claim that the two synthetic tasks cleanly disentangle perception from reasoning. The manuscript provides no explicit ablation or correlation analysis ruling out confounds such as perception errors propagating into reasoning steps or task artifacts that couple the two. This is load-bearing for the causal claims and the reported gains from the interventions.
minor comments (2)
  1. [Abstract and §5] Abstract and results sections: quantitative gains (18.2, 6.0, 3.2) are stated without accompanying error bars, number of runs, or statistical tests; these should be added for reproducibility.
  2. [§4.2] Notation for the perception-aware reward and the surrogate reward should be defined explicitly with equations rather than prose descriptions.

Simulated Author's Rebuttal

1 responses · 0 unresolved

We thank the referee for the constructive feedback and for recognizing the methodological strengths of the controlled synthetic setup and the SFT-vs-RL distinction. We address the single major comment below.

read point-by-point responses

  1. Referee: [§3] §3 (Synthetic Tasks): The central attribution of the asymmetry to token imbalance (SFT) or reward coupling (RL) rests on the claim that the two synthetic tasks cleanly disentangle perception from reasoning. The manuscript provides no explicit ablation or correlation analysis ruling out confounds such as perception errors propagating into reasoning steps or task artifacts that couple the two. This is load-bearing for the causal claims and the reported gains from the interventions.

    Authors: We agree that explicit validation strengthens the causal attribution. The tasks were constructed so that perception (object identification in isolated visual queries) and reasoning (relational inference over provided symbolic inputs) operate on disjoint token sequences and evaluation metrics, with no shared intermediate states that would induce propagation. Nevertheless, the manuscript does not currently include the requested correlation or ablation analyses. We will add them in revision: (i) Pearson correlation between per-example perception and reasoning accuracies across checkpoints, and (ii) a controlled error-injection ablation that perturbs only perception outputs while holding reasoning inputs fixed, quantifying downstream reasoning degradation. These additions will directly test for residual coupling. revision: yes

Circularity Check

0 steps flagged

No circularity: empirical diagnostic framework with independent experimental results

full rationale

The paper introduces synthetic tasks as a diagnostic tool and reports observed asymmetries from post-training experiments (SFT token imbalance, RL reward coupling). These are measured outcomes, not quantities defined in terms of themselves or fitted parameters renamed as predictions. No equations, self-citations, or uniqueness theorems appear in the provided text. The central claims rest on experimental deltas (e.g., +18.2, +6.0) rather than any reduction to inputs by construction. This is a standard empirical analysis; the disentanglement assumption is a methodological precondition, not a circular step.

Axiom & Free-Parameter Ledger

0 free parameters · 0 axioms · 0 invented entities

Review based solely on abstract; no details on free parameters, axioms, or invented entities are provided.

pith-pipeline@v0.9.1-grok · 5750 in / 1173 out tokens · 21844 ms · 2026-06-29T07:36:54.721737+00:00 · methodology

0 comments
read the original abstract

Post-training has greatly improved reasoning in frontier vision-language models, yet its gains for perception remain comparatively limited, creating a bottleneck for end-to-end visual reasoning. To investigate this gap, we introduce a controlled diagnostic framework with two synthetic tasks that disentangle perception from reasoning. Our analysis reveals a consistent perception-reasoning asymmetry: posttraining improves reasoning more substantially than perception, though the underlying mechanism differs by training paradigm. For supervised fine-tuning (SFT), this asymmetry stems from token imbalance in chain-of-thought supervision, where perception occupies fewer tokens and thus receives a weaker training signal. Dynamically reweighting the loss mitigates this imbalance and boosts end-to-end performance by up to 18.2. For reinforcement learning (RL), the asymmetry instead arises from reward coupling: outcome rewards correlate more strongly with reasoning than with perception, weakening the signal for perception learning. Adding a perception-aware reward alleviates the imbalance and improves end-to-end accuracy by up to 6.0; even without groundtruth perception rewards, a reliable surrogate reward provide useful signal, yielding gains of 3.2 points. Together, our results comprehensively diagnose asymmetric optimization and suggest concrete interventions to balance perception and reasoning.

Figures

Figures reproduced from arXiv: 2605.29496 by Kai-Wei Chang, Nanyun Peng, Xueqing Wu, Yu-Chi Lin.

Figure 1
Figure 1. Figure 1: Asymmetric optimization of perception and rea￾soning in VLM post-training. Both SFT (left) and RL (right) improve reasoning (R) substantially more than perception (P), but with different causes and mitigation mechanism. et al.; Yue et al., 2024, 2025). However, stronger reasoning does not necessarily imply more reliable perception: recent studies suggest that post-training may yield limited gains, or even … view at source ↗
Figure 2
Figure 2. Figure 2: Task illustration. We show the graph coloring (GC) and Sudoku tasks with their input images, ground truth perception, and expected reasoning respectively. accuracy is thus given by a = Acc(r | p ∗ ). Evaluating reasoning accuracy is nontrivial be￾cause reasoning is conditioned on perception, so reasoning errors are naturally entangled with per￾ception errors. An intuitive metric is conditional reasoning ac… view at source ↗
Figure 3
Figure 3. Figure 3: Perception and reasoning accuracy during SFT optimization of Qwen model on GC task, highlight￾ing the asymmetric optimization [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p005_3.png] view at source ↗
Figure 5
Figure 5. Figure 5: Perception and reasoning accuracy before and after SFT. Both start near zero, but SFT substantially im￾proves reasoning while leaving perception largely flat. reasoning performance. Starting from base mod￾els that achieve near-zero accuracy in both per￾ception and reasoning on our out-of-distribution tasks, SFT exhibits a pronounced asymmetry: it substantially improves reasoning while yielding only limited… view at source ↗
Figure 7
Figure 7. Figure 7 [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p006_7.png] view at source ↗
Figure 8
Figure 8. Figure 8: Correlation between outcome reward and percep￾tion (P) or reasoning (R) accuracy, measured by Pearson’s r [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p006_8.png] view at source ↗
Figure 9
Figure 9. Figure 9: Perception and reasoning accuracy during RL optimization of Qwen model on GC task [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p007_9.png] view at source ↗
Figure 11
Figure 11. Figure 11: The correlation r between RL reward and perception accuracy reliably predicts the perception gains ∆ap after RL. GC Sudoku Qwen InternVL Qwen InternVL Init model 10.2 15.8 18.4 14.6 Standard RL (α = 0) 18.8 20.6 50.6 40.2 Reward Augmentation 22.4 22.6 56.6 38.6 ↑3.6 ↑2.0 ↑6.0 ↓1.6 [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p007_11.png] view at source ↗
Figure 12
Figure 12. Figure 12: Full SFT optimization curves across all four model-task settings. This figure extends Figure [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p014_12.png] view at source ↗
Figure 13
Figure 13. Figure 13: Full perception-reasoning trade-off results for SFT loss reweighting across all four model-task settings. [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p014_13.png] view at source ↗
Figure 14
Figure 14. Figure 14: Full perception-reasoning trade-off results after stronger perception initialization across all four model [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p014_14.png] view at source ↗
Figure 15
Figure 15. Figure 15: Full RL optimization curves across all four model-task settings. This figure extends Figure [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p014_15.png] view at source ↗
Figure 16
Figure 16. Figure 16: Full perception-reasoning trade-off results for RL reward augmentation across all four model-task [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p015_16.png] view at source ↗
Figure 17
Figure 17. Figure 17: Optimization trajectories of RL token reweighting. Unlike SFT loss reweighting, directly in￾creasing the weight on perception-token policy-gradient terms does not improve perception or end-to-end accu￾racy, and instead degrades training. This indicates that RL asymmetry is not primarily driven by token imbal￾ance. and degrades both perception and end-to-end per￾formance. This suggests that the RL asymmetr… view at source ↗

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Reference graph

Works this paper leans on

7 extracted references · 4 canonical work pages · 2 internal anchors

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    The graph coloring dataset (Heyman and Zyl- berberg, 2025) released under MIT license is adapted for building our graph coloring task

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    We have reviewed the licenses and intended-use conditions of all existing artifacts we used

    The Sudoku dataset (Du et al., 2024) released under MIT license is adapted for building our Sudoku task; 9.MNIST images (LeCun et al., 2010) released under MIT license for rendering Sudoku im- ages. We have reviewed the licenses and intended-use conditions of all existing artifacts we used. The models and training frameworks we adopt are re- leased under ...

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    Hyperparameter Value train_batch_size 128 lr 1e-6 ppo_mini_batch_size 128 use_kl_loss true kl_loss_coef 0.01 total_training_steps 100 Table 7: Hyperparameter settings for QwenVL RL

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    2025