Visual Representation Alignment for Multimodal Large Language Models

🤗 Upvotes: 66 | cs.CL Authors: Tong Zheng, Hongming Zhang, Wenhao Yu, Xiaoyang Wang, Xinyu Yang, Runpeng Dai, Rui Liu, Huiwen Bao, Chengsong Huang, Heng Huang, Dong Yu Title: Parallel-R1: Towards Parallel Thinking via Reinforcement Learning Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2509.07980v1 Abstract: Parallel thinking has emerged as a novel approach for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) by exploring multiple reasoning paths concurrently. However, activating such capabilities through training remains challenging, as existing methods predominantly rely on supervised fine-tuning (SFT) over synthetic data, which encourages teacher-forced imitation rather than exploration and generalization. Different from them, we propose \textbf{Parallel-R1}, the first reinforcement learning (RL) framework that enables parallel thinking behaviors for complex real-world reasoning tasks. Our framework employs a progressive curriculum that explicitly addresses the cold-start problem in training parallel thinking with RL. We first use SFT on prompt-generated trajectories from easier tasks to instill the parallel thinking ability, then transition to RL to explore and generalize this skill on harder problems. Experiments on various math benchmarks, including MATH, AMC23, and AIME, show that Parallel-R1 successfully instills parallel thinking, leading to 8.4% accuracy improvements over the sequential thinking model trained directly on challenging tasks with RL. Further analysis reveals a clear shift in the model's thinking behavior: at an early stage, it uses parallel thinking as an exploration strategy, while in a later stage, it uses the same capability for multi-perspective verification. Most significantly, we validate parallel thinking as a \textbf{mid-training exploration scaffold}, where this temporary exploratory phase unlocks a higher performance ceiling after RL, yielding a 42.9% improvement over the baseline on AIME25. Our model, data, and code will be open-source at https://github.com/zhengkid/Parallel-R1.

🤗 Upvotes: 54 | cs.CV Authors: Heeji Yoon, Jaewoo Jung, Junwan Kim, Hyungyu Choi, Heeseong Shin, Sangbeom Lim, Honggyu An, Chaehyun Kim, Jisang Han, Donghyun Kim, Chanho Eom, Sunghwan Hong, Seungryong Kim Title: Visual Representation Alignment for Multimodal Large Language Models Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2509.07979v1 Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) trained with visual instruction tuning have achieved strong performance across diverse tasks, yet they remain limited in vision-centric tasks such as object counting or spatial reasoning. We attribute this gap to the prevailing text-only supervision paradigm, which provides only indirect guidance for the visual pathway and often leads MLLMs to discard fine-grained visual details during training. In this paper, we present VIsual Representation ALignment (VIRAL), a simple yet effective regularization strategy that aligns the internal visual representations of MLLMs with those of pre-trained vision foundation models (VFMs). By explicitly enforcing this alignment, VIRAL enables the model not only to retain critical visual details from the input vision encoder but also to complement additional visual knowledge from VFMs, thereby enhancing its ability to reason over complex visual inputs. Our experiments demonstrate consistent improvements across all tasks on widely adopted multimodal benchmarks. Furthermore, we conduct comprehensive ablation studies to validate the key design choices underlying our framework. We believe this simple finding opens up an important direction for the effective integration of visual information in training MLLMs.

🤗 Upvotes: 45 | cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.CL Authors: Xin Lai, Junyi Li, Wei Li, Tao Liu, Tianjian Li, Hengshuang Zhao Title: Mini-o3: Scaling Up Reasoning Patterns and Interaction Turns for Visual Search Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2509.07969v1 Abstract: Recent advances in large multimodal models have leveraged image-based tools with reinforcement learning to tackle visual problems. However, existing open-source approaches often exhibit monotonous reasoning patterns and allow only a limited number of interaction turns, making them inadequate for difficult tasks that require trial-and-error exploration. In this work, we address this limitation by scaling up tool-based interactions and introduce Mini-o3, a system that executes deep, multi-turn reasoning -- spanning tens of steps -- and achieves state-of-the-art performance on challenging visual search tasks. Our recipe for reproducing OpenAI o3-style behaviors comprises three key components. First, we construct the Visual Probe Dataset, a collection of thousands of challenging visual search problems designed for exploratory reasoning. Second, we develop an iterative data collection pipeline to obtain cold-start trajectories that exhibit diverse reasoning patterns, including depth-first search, trial-and-error, and goal maintenance. Third, we propose an over-turn masking strategy that prevents penalization of over-turn responses (those that hit the maximum number of turns) during reinforcement learning, thereby balancing training-time efficiency with test-time scalability. Despite training with an upper bound of only six interaction turns, our model generates trajectories that naturally scale to tens of turns at inference time, with accuracy improving as the number of turns increases. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Mini-o3 produces rich reasoning patterns and deep thinking paths, effectively solving challenging visual search problems.

🤗 Upvotes: 31 | cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.LG Authors: Ji Xie, Trevor Darrell, Luke Zettlemoyer, XuDong Wang Title: Reconstruction Alignment Improves Unified Multimodal Models Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2509.07295v1 Abstract: Unified multimodal models (UMMs) unify visual understanding and generation within a single architecture. However, conventional training relies on image-text pairs (or sequences) whose captions are typically sparse and miss fine-grained visual details--even when they use hundreds of words to describe a simple image. We introduce Reconstruction Alignment (RecA), a resource-efficient post-training method that leverages visual understanding encoder embeddings as dense "text prompts," providing rich supervision without captions. Concretely, RecA conditions a UMM on its own visual understanding embeddings and optimizes it to reconstruct the input image with a self-supervised reconstruction loss, thereby realigning understanding and generation. Despite its simplicity, RecA is broadly applicable: across autoregressive, masked-autoregressive, and diffusion-based UMMs, it consistently improves generation and editing fidelity. With only 27 GPU-hours, post-training with RecA substantially improves image generation performance on GenEval (0.73$\rightarrow$0.90) and DPGBench (80.93$\rightarrow$88.15), while also boosting editing benchmarks (ImgEdit 3.38$\rightarrow$3.75, GEdit 6.94$\rightarrow$7.25). Notably, RecA surpasses much larger open-source models and applies broadly across diverse UMM architectures, establishing it as an efficient and general post-training alignment strategy for UMMs

🤗 Upvotes: 24 | cs.CV, cs.LG Authors: Yufeng Cheng, Wenxu Wu, Shaojin Wu, Mengqi Huang, Fei Ding, Qian He Title: UMO: Scaling Multi-Identity Consistency for Image Customization via Matching Reward Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2509.06818v1 Abstract: Recent advancements in image customization exhibit a wide range of application prospects due to stronger customization capabilities. However, since we humans are more sensitive to faces, a significant challenge remains in preserving consistent identity while avoiding identity confusion with multi-reference images, limiting the identity scalability of customization models. To address this, we present UMO, a Unified Multi-identity Optimization framework, designed to maintain high-fidelity identity preservation and alleviate identity confusion with scalability. With "multi-to-multi matching" paradigm, UMO reformulates multi-identity generation as a global assignment optimization problem and unleashes multi-identity consistency for existing image customization methods generally through reinforcement learning on diffusion models. To facilitate the training of UMO, we develop a scalable customization dataset with multi-reference images, consisting of both synthesised and real parts. Additionally, we propose a new metric to measure identity confusion. Extensive experiments demonstrate that UMO not only improves identity consistency significantly, but also reduces identity confusion on several image customization methods, setting a new state-of-the-art among open-source methods along the dimension of identity preserving. Code and model: https://github.com/bytedance/UMO

🤗 Upvotes: 107 | cs.AI, cs.CL Authors: Haozhe Wang, Haoran Que, Qixin Xu, Minghao Liu, Wangchunshu Zhou, Jiazhan Feng, Wanjun Zhong, Wei Ye, Tong Yang, Wenhao Huang, Ge Zhang, Fangzhen Lin Title: Reverse-Engineered Reasoning for Open-Ended Generation Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2509.06160v1 Abstract: While the ``deep reasoning'' paradigm has spurred significant advances in verifiable domains like mathematics, its application to open-ended, creative generation remains a critical challenge. The two dominant methods for instilling reasoning -- reinforcement learning (RL) and instruction distillation -- falter in this area; RL struggles with the absence of clear reward signals and high-quality reward models, while distillation is prohibitively expensive and capped by the teacher model's capabilities. To overcome these limitations, we introduce REverse-Engineered Reasoning (REER), a new paradigm that fundamentally shifts the approach. Instead of building a reasoning process ``forwards'' through trial-and-error or imitation, REER works ``backwards'' from known-good solutions to computationally discover the latent, step-by-step deep reasoning process that could have produced them. Using this scalable, gradient-free approach, we curate and open-source DeepWriting-20K, a large-scale dataset of 20,000 deep reasoning trajectories for open-ended tasks. Our model, DeepWriter-8B, trained on this data, not only surpasses strong open-source baselines but also achieves performance competitive with, and at times superior to, leading proprietary models like GPT-4o and Claude 3.5.

🤗 Upvotes: 28 | cs.CV Authors: Che Liu, Yinda Chen, Haoyuan Shi, Jinpeng Lu, Bailiang Jian, Jiazhen Pan, Linghan Cai, Jiayi Wang, Yundi Zhang, Jun Li, Cosmin I. Bercea, Cheng Ouyang, Chen Chen, Zhiwei Xiong, Benedikt Wiestler, Christian Wachinger, Daniel Rueckert, Wenjia Bai, Rossella Arcucci Title: Does DINOv3 Set a New Medical Vision Standard? Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2509.06467v1 Abstract: The advent of large-scale vision foundation models, pre-trained on diverse natural images, has marked a paradigm shift in computer vision. However, how the frontier vision foundation models' efficacies transfer to specialized domains remains such as medical imaging remains an open question. This report investigates whether DINOv3, a state-of-the-art self-supervised vision transformer (ViT) that features strong capability in dense prediction tasks, can directly serve as a powerful, unified encoder for medical vision tasks without domain-specific pre-training. To answer this, we benchmark DINOv3 across common medical vision tasks, including 2D/3D classification and segmentation on a wide range of medical imaging modalities. We systematically analyze its scalability by varying model sizes and input image resolutions. Our findings reveal that DINOv3 shows impressive performance and establishes a formidable new baseline. Remarkably, it can even outperform medical-specific foundation models like BiomedCLIP and CT-Net on several tasks, despite being trained solely on natural images. However, we identify clear limitations: The model's features degrade in scenarios requiring deep domain specialization, such as in Whole-Slide Pathological Images (WSIs), Electron Microscopy (EM), and Positron Emission Tomography (PET). Furthermore, we observe that DINOv3 does not consistently obey scaling law in the medical domain; performance does not reliably increase with larger models or finer feature resolutions, showing diverse scaling behaviors across tasks. Ultimately, our work establishes DINOv3 as a strong baseline, whose powerful visual features can serve as a robust prior for multiple complex medical tasks. This opens promising future directions, such as leveraging its features to enforce multiview consistency in 3D reconstruction.

🤗 Upvotes: 31 | cs.CV, cs.LG Authors: Yamei Chen, Haoquan Zhang, Yangyi Huang, Zeju Qiu, Kaipeng Zhang, Yandong Wen, Weiyang Liu Title: Symbolic Graphics Programming with Large Language Models Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2509.05208v1 Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) excel at program synthesis, yet their ability to produce symbolic graphics programs (SGPs) that render into precise visual content remains underexplored. We study symbolic graphics programming, where the goal is to generate an SGP from a natural-language description. This task also serves as a lens into how LLMs understand the visual world by prompting them to generate images rendered from SGPs. Among various SGPs, our paper sticks to scalable vector graphics (SVGs). We begin by examining the extent to which LLMs can generate SGPs. To this end, we introduce SGP-GenBench, a comprehensive benchmark covering object fidelity, scene fidelity, and compositionality (attribute binding, spatial relations, numeracy). On SGP-GenBench, we discover that frontier proprietary models substantially outperform open-source models, and performance correlates well with general coding capabilities. Motivated by this gap, we aim to improve LLMs' ability to generate SGPs. We propose a reinforcement learning (RL) with verifiable rewards approach, where a format-validity gate ensures renderable SVG, and a cross-modal reward aligns text and the rendered image via strong vision encoders (e.g., SigLIP for text-image and DINO for image-image). Applied to Qwen-2.5-7B, our method substantially improves SVG generation quality and semantics, achieving performance on par with frontier systems. We further analyze training dynamics, showing that RL induces (i) finer decomposition of objects into controllable primitives and (ii) contextual details that improve scene coherence. Our results demonstrate that symbolic graphics programming offers a precise and interpretable lens on cross-modal grounding.

🤗 Upvotes: 31 | cs.LG Authors: Itai Gat, Heli Ben-Hamu, Marton Havasi, Daniel Haziza, Jeremy Reizenstein, Gabriel Synnaeve, David Lopez-Paz, Brian Karrer, Yaron Lipman Title: Set Block Decoding is a Language Model Inference Accelerator Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2509.04185v1 Abstract: Autoregressive next token prediction language models offer powerful capabilities but face significant challenges in practical deployment due to the high computational and memory costs of inference, particularly during the decoding stage. We introduce Set Block Decoding (SBD), a simple and flexible paradigm that accelerates generation by integrating standard next token prediction (NTP) and masked token prediction (MATP) within a single architecture. SBD allows the model to sample multiple, not necessarily consecutive, future tokens in parallel, a key distinction from previous acceleration methods. This flexibility allows the use of advanced solvers from the discrete diffusion literature, offering significant speedups without sacrificing accuracy. SBD requires no architectural changes or extra training hyperparameters, maintains compatibility with exact KV-caching, and can be implemented by fine-tuning existing next token prediction models. By fine-tuning Llama-3.1 8B and Qwen-3 8B, we demonstrate that SBD enables a 3-5x reduction in the number of forward passes required for generation while achieving same performance as equivalent NTP training.

🤗 Upvotes: 100 | cs.CL Authors: Yang Wang, Chenghao Xiao, Chia-Yi Hsiao, Zi Yan Chang, Chi-Li Chen, Tyler Loakman, Chenghua Lin Title: Drivel-ology: Challenging LLMs with Interpreting Nonsense with Depth Arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2509.03867v1 Abstract: We introduce Drivelology, a unique linguistic phenomenon characterised as "nonsense with depth", utterances that are syntactically coherent yet pragmatically paradoxical, emotionally loaded, or rhetorically subversive. While such expressions may resemble surface-level nonsense, they encode implicit meaning requiring contextual inference, moral reasoning, or emotional interpretation. We find that current large language models (LLMs), despite excelling at many natural language processing (NLP) tasks, consistently fail to grasp the layered semantics of Drivelological text. To investigate this, we construct a small but diverse benchmark dataset of over 1,200 meticulously curated examples, with select instances in English, Mandarin, Spanish, French, Japanese, and Korean. Annotation was especially challenging: each of the examples required careful expert review to verify that it truly reflected Drivelological characteristics. The process involved multiple rounds of discussion and adjudication to address disagreements, highlighting the subtle and subjective nature of the Drivelology. We evaluate a range of LLMs on classification, generation, and reasoning tasks. Our results reveal clear limitations of LLMs: models often confuse Drivelology with shallow nonsense, produce incoherent justifications, or miss the implied rhetorical function altogether. These findings highlight a deeper representational gap in LLMs' pragmatic understanding and challenge the assumption that statistical fluency implies cognitive comprehension. We release our dataset and code to facilitate further research in modelling linguistic depth beyond surface-level coherence.