PDCR: Perception-Decomposed Confidence Reward for Vision-Language Reasoning

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Yoon, Hee Suk, Yoon, Eunseop, Hong, Ji Woo, Eom, SooHwan, Koo, Gwanhyeong, Hasegawa-Johnson, Mark, Dai, Qi, Luo, Chong, Yoo, Chang D.
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
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author Yoon, Hee Suk
Yoon, Eunseop
Hong, Ji Woo
Eom, SooHwan
Koo, Gwanhyeong
Hasegawa-Johnson, Mark
Dai, Qi
Luo, Chong
Yoo, Chang D.
author_facet Yoon, Hee Suk
Yoon, Eunseop
Hong, Ji Woo
Eom, SooHwan
Koo, Gwanhyeong
Hasegawa-Johnson, Mark
Dai, Qi
Luo, Chong
Yoo, Chang D.
contents Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) traditionally relies on a sparse, outcome-based signal. Recent work shows that providing a fine-grained, model-intrinsic signal (rewarding the confidence growth in the ground-truth answer) effectively improves language reasoning training by providing step-level guidance without costly external models. While effective for unimodal text, we find that naively applying this global reward to vision-language (V-L) reasoning is a suboptimal strategy, as the task is a heterogeneous mix of sparse visual perception and dense textual reasoning. This global normalization creates mixture-induced signal degradation, where the training signal for visual steps is statistically distorted by the predominant textual steps. We propose Perception-Decomposed Confidence Reward (PDCR), a framework that solves this by aligning the reward structure with the task's heterogeneous nature. PDCR first performs an unsupervised skill decomposition, introducing a model-internal Visual Dependence Score to quantify visual reliance and applying a clustering algorithm to separate perception and reasoning steps. Based on this, PDCR computes a decomposed advantage by normalizing confidence gains within each skill cluster. This intra-cluster normalization provides a stable, correctly-scaled signal for both perception and reasoning. We demonstrate that PDCR outperforms the naive, global-reward formulation and sparse-reward baselines on key V-L reasoning benchmarks.
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publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle PDCR: Perception-Decomposed Confidence Reward for Vision-Language Reasoning
Yoon, Hee Suk
Yoon, Eunseop
Hong, Ji Woo
Eom, SooHwan
Koo, Gwanhyeong
Hasegawa-Johnson, Mark
Dai, Qi
Luo, Chong
Yoo, Chang D.
Computation and Language
Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) traditionally relies on a sparse, outcome-based signal. Recent work shows that providing a fine-grained, model-intrinsic signal (rewarding the confidence growth in the ground-truth answer) effectively improves language reasoning training by providing step-level guidance without costly external models. While effective for unimodal text, we find that naively applying this global reward to vision-language (V-L) reasoning is a suboptimal strategy, as the task is a heterogeneous mix of sparse visual perception and dense textual reasoning. This global normalization creates mixture-induced signal degradation, where the training signal for visual steps is statistically distorted by the predominant textual steps. We propose Perception-Decomposed Confidence Reward (PDCR), a framework that solves this by aligning the reward structure with the task's heterogeneous nature. PDCR first performs an unsupervised skill decomposition, introducing a model-internal Visual Dependence Score to quantify visual reliance and applying a clustering algorithm to separate perception and reasoning steps. Based on this, PDCR computes a decomposed advantage by normalizing confidence gains within each skill cluster. This intra-cluster normalization provides a stable, correctly-scaled signal for both perception and reasoning. We demonstrate that PDCR outperforms the naive, global-reward formulation and sparse-reward baselines on key V-L reasoning benchmarks.
title PDCR: Perception-Decomposed Confidence Reward for Vision-Language Reasoning
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.13467