Reasoning-Aligned Perception Decoupling for Scalable Multi-modal Reasoning

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Gou, Yunhao, Chen, Kai, Liu, Zhili, Hong, Lanqing, Jin, Xin, Li, Zhenguo, Kwok, James T., Zhang, Yu
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Gou, Yunhao
Chen, Kai
Liu, Zhili
Hong, Lanqing
Jin, Xin
Li, Zhenguo
Kwok, James T.
Zhang, Yu
author_facet Gou, Yunhao
Chen, Kai
Liu, Zhili
Hong, Lanqing
Jin, Xin
Li, Zhenguo
Kwok, James T.
Zhang, Yu
contents Recent breakthroughs in reasoning language models have significantly advanced text-based reasoning. On the other hand, Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) still lag behind, hindered by their outdated internal LLMs. Upgrading these LLMs is often prohibitively expensive, as it requires costly vision-language alignment retraining. To address this issue, we introduce Perception-Reasoning Decoupling, which modularizes the MLLM's reasoning component and makes it easily replaceable. This approach redefines the MLLM's role to convert multi-modal inputs into detailed textual outputs that can be processed by any powerful, external, text-only LLM reasoners. To align the MLLM's perceptual output with the final reasoning task, we propose a novel reinforcement learning algorithm called Visual Perception Optimization (VPO). VPO rewards the MLLM based on the correctness of answers generated by the external reasoner to produce faithful and query-relevant captions. Together, this decoupling pipeline and VPO form our Reasoning-Aligned PerceptIon Decoupling (RAPID) approach. Empirical results show that RAPID achieves significant performance gains on multi-modal reasoning benchmarks. Crucially, RAPID enables a novel inference-time scaling paradigm: Once trained with VPO, the MLLM can be paired with any state-of-the-art LLM reasoner for consistent performance improvement without retraining.
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publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Reasoning-Aligned Perception Decoupling for Scalable Multi-modal Reasoning
Gou, Yunhao
Chen, Kai
Liu, Zhili
Hong, Lanqing
Jin, Xin
Li, Zhenguo
Kwok, James T.
Zhang, Yu
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Recent breakthroughs in reasoning language models have significantly advanced text-based reasoning. On the other hand, Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) still lag behind, hindered by their outdated internal LLMs. Upgrading these LLMs is often prohibitively expensive, as it requires costly vision-language alignment retraining. To address this issue, we introduce Perception-Reasoning Decoupling, which modularizes the MLLM's reasoning component and makes it easily replaceable. This approach redefines the MLLM's role to convert multi-modal inputs into detailed textual outputs that can be processed by any powerful, external, text-only LLM reasoners. To align the MLLM's perceptual output with the final reasoning task, we propose a novel reinforcement learning algorithm called Visual Perception Optimization (VPO). VPO rewards the MLLM based on the correctness of answers generated by the external reasoner to produce faithful and query-relevant captions. Together, this decoupling pipeline and VPO form our Reasoning-Aligned PerceptIon Decoupling (RAPID) approach. Empirical results show that RAPID achieves significant performance gains on multi-modal reasoning benchmarks. Crucially, RAPID enables a novel inference-time scaling paradigm: Once trained with VPO, the MLLM can be paired with any state-of-the-art LLM reasoner for consistent performance improvement without retraining.
title Reasoning-Aligned Perception Decoupling for Scalable Multi-modal Reasoning
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.04559