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Autori principali: Ren, Yiming, Yang, Yujiu, Wang, Junjie
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
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Accesso online:https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.26330
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author Ren, Yiming
Yang, Yujiu
Wang, Junjie
author_facet Ren, Yiming
Yang, Yujiu
Wang, Junjie
contents Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on visual instruction data often improves perceptual capabilities in vision-language models (VLMs) while degrading reasoning performance, creating a persistent reasoning tax during post-training. We investigate whether this degradation is related to disrupted access to depth-wise representations, and find that even fixed cross-depth aggregation substantially restores reasoning, suggesting that preserved cross-depth access is an important missing factor in VLM fine-tuning. Building on this observation, we propose Input-Adaptive Depth Aggregation (IADA), a lightweight mechanism that makes cross-depth retrieval input-adaptive, modality-aware, and efficiently parameterized through a low-rank bottleneck. On Qwen3-VL-2B, IADA improves the average reasoning score by 9.5 points and the average perception score by $3.3$ points over LoRA-only fine-tuning with only 0.14M additional parameters, with the strongest gains appearing in parameter-efficient low-rank settings.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_26330
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Mitigating the Reasoning Tax in Vision-Language Fine-Tuning with Input-Adaptive Depth Aggregation
Ren, Yiming
Yang, Yujiu
Wang, Junjie
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on visual instruction data often improves perceptual capabilities in vision-language models (VLMs) while degrading reasoning performance, creating a persistent reasoning tax during post-training. We investigate whether this degradation is related to disrupted access to depth-wise representations, and find that even fixed cross-depth aggregation substantially restores reasoning, suggesting that preserved cross-depth access is an important missing factor in VLM fine-tuning. Building on this observation, we propose Input-Adaptive Depth Aggregation (IADA), a lightweight mechanism that makes cross-depth retrieval input-adaptive, modality-aware, and efficiently parameterized through a low-rank bottleneck. On Qwen3-VL-2B, IADA improves the average reasoning score by 9.5 points and the average perception score by $3.3$ points over LoRA-only fine-tuning with only 0.14M additional parameters, with the strongest gains appearing in parameter-efficient low-rank settings.
title Mitigating the Reasoning Tax in Vision-Language Fine-Tuning with Input-Adaptive Depth Aggregation
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.26330