Seeing Before Reasoning: Decoupling Perception and Reasoning for Shortcut-Resilient Multimodal On-Policy Self-Distillation
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Computer Science > Machine Learning
Title:Seeing Before Reasoning: Decoupling Perception and Reasoning for Shortcut-Resilient Multimodal On-Policy Self-Distillation
Abstract:On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) trains a model on its own rollouts and uses a frozen copy to provide dense token-level targets conditioned on a reference target. This works well for LLM reasoning, but a direct extension to multimodal large language models (MLLMs) can create a shortcut: the privileged target may guide tokens mainly based on the text reference target rather than the image. We propose ViGOS, a visually grounded OPSD framework for MLLM post-training. The student first writes a visual description and then reasons toward the final answer. For valid rollouts, an image-only perception teacher supervises the description, while a privileged reasoning teacher supervises the reasoning and final answer on the same student prefix. A reference teacher is used only for invalid rollouts to recover the output format. Across general vision-language, expert reasoning, visual math, spatial grounding, and visual-language-prior benchmarks, ViGOS keeps the main benefits of OPSD and improves image-grounded behavior in shortcut-prone settings.
| Comments: | 29 pages, 5 figures, 8 tables |
| Subjects: | Machine Learning (cs.LG); Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV) |
| Cite as: | arXiv:2606.19120 [cs.LG] |
| (or arXiv:2606.19120v1 [cs.LG] for this version) | |
| https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.19120
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
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