Spotlight on Token Perception for Multimodal Reinforcement Learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Huang, Siyuan, Qu, Xiaoye, Li, Yafu, Luo, Yun, He, Zefeng, Liu, Daizong, Cheng, Yu
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Huang, Siyuan
Qu, Xiaoye
Li, Yafu
Luo, Yun
He, Zefeng
Liu, Daizong
Cheng, Yu
author_facet Huang, Siyuan
Qu, Xiaoye
Li, Yafu
Luo, Yun
He, Zefeng
Liu, Daizong
Cheng, Yu
contents While Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has advanced the reasoning capabilities of Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs), most existing methods in multimodal reasoning neglect the critical role of visual perception within the RLVR optimization process. In this paper, we undertake a pioneering exploration of multimodal RLVR through the novel perspective of token perception, which measures the visual dependency of each generated token. With a granular analysis of Chain-of-Thought (CoT) processes, we uncover two key insights: first, token perception in a rollout trajectory is sparsely distributed, where only a small fraction of tokens have high visual dependency for visually-grounded reasoning; second, different trajectories exhibit significant divergence in their overall visual dependency. Based on these observations, we propose Visually-Perceptive Policy Optimization (VPPO), a novel policy gradient algorithm that explicitly leverages token perception to refine the learning signal. Specifically, VPPO achieves this through a dual mechanism: it reweights a trajectory's advantage by its overall visual dependency, and focuses policy updates exclusively on perceptually pivotal tokens. On a comprehensive suite of eight perception and reasoning benchmarks, VPPO demonstrates substantial gains over leading open-source RL-tuned models, with its effectiveness consistently validated across 7B and 32B model scales. Our findings not only establish a new token-level perceptual perspective for analyzing multimodal RLVR but also present a novel and effective optimization strategy to significantly enhance the multimodal reasoning capabilities of LVLMs.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_09285
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Spotlight on Token Perception for Multimodal Reinforcement Learning
Huang, Siyuan
Qu, Xiaoye
Li, Yafu
Luo, Yun
He, Zefeng
Liu, Daizong
Cheng, Yu
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
While Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has advanced the reasoning capabilities of Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs), most existing methods in multimodal reasoning neglect the critical role of visual perception within the RLVR optimization process. In this paper, we undertake a pioneering exploration of multimodal RLVR through the novel perspective of token perception, which measures the visual dependency of each generated token. With a granular analysis of Chain-of-Thought (CoT) processes, we uncover two key insights: first, token perception in a rollout trajectory is sparsely distributed, where only a small fraction of tokens have high visual dependency for visually-grounded reasoning; second, different trajectories exhibit significant divergence in their overall visual dependency. Based on these observations, we propose Visually-Perceptive Policy Optimization (VPPO), a novel policy gradient algorithm that explicitly leverages token perception to refine the learning signal. Specifically, VPPO achieves this through a dual mechanism: it reweights a trajectory's advantage by its overall visual dependency, and focuses policy updates exclusively on perceptually pivotal tokens. On a comprehensive suite of eight perception and reasoning benchmarks, VPPO demonstrates substantial gains over leading open-source RL-tuned models, with its effectiveness consistently validated across 7B and 32B model scales. Our findings not only establish a new token-level perceptual perspective for analyzing multimodal RLVR but also present a novel and effective optimization strategy to significantly enhance the multimodal reasoning capabilities of LVLMs.
title Spotlight on Token Perception for Multimodal Reinforcement Learning
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.09285