用视觉线索替代答案特权,让模型更可靠地学习视觉推理。
ViCuR: Visual Cues as Recoverable Privilege for Multimodal On-Policy Distillation

- 用输入中的视觉线索作为教师特权,而非依赖不可见的答案
- 在7个基准上提升平均性能1.19~1.24分,8B模型跨域表现更好
- 无需修改推理接口,轻量模块可自动恢复关键视觉证据
在多模态推理中,传统基于答案的在线策略蒸馏(OPD)因教师依赖训练时专属信号(如参考答案或推理链),导致训练与测试不匹配,诱导模型走捷径。本文提出ViCuR,将答案侧特权替换为输入中的视觉线索(查询相关证据),这些线索与推理时的视觉输入一致,可被学生恢复。ViCuR引入轻量级线索恢复模块,在预填充阶段通过专用汇合标记交叉注意力,将任务相关视觉证据聚合至内部表示,无需改变推理接口或额外损失。在使用Qwen3-VL-2B和8B学生模型的七个基准上,ViCuR相比答案基线分别提升1.19和1.24分;在更强教师设置下,进一步超越基线0.64和1.08分,且8B模型在跨域任务中持续获益。结果表明,教师特权的设计与教师强度同等重要。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
On-policy distillation (OPD) improves reasoning by training a student on trajectories sampled from its own policy under supervision from a teacher. In multimodal reasoning, a common extension is to use a privileged teacher that observes training-time-only signals such as reference answers or rationales. However, such answer-side privilege creates a train-test mismatch: the teacher's supervision may depend on signals unavailable to the student, encouraging shortcut imitation rather than visually grounded reasoning. We propose ViCuR, a visually grounded privileged-teacher distillation framework that replaces answer-side privilege with visual cues (query-related evidence in the input). Because these cues are derived from the same visual input available at inference, their evidence is recoverable by the student. To support this, ViCuR introduces a lightweight cue recovery module that uses dedicated sink-token cross-attention during prefill to aggregate task-relevant visual evidence into an internal representation, without changing the inference interface or requiring auxiliary cue-generation losses. Across seven benchmarks with Qwen3-VL-2B and 8B students, ViCuR consistently improves over answer-based on-policy self-distillation by +1.19 and +1.24 on overall average performance. It also extends naturally to stronger-teacher OPD, surpassing OPD baselines by +0.64 and +1.08, with consistent out-of-domain gains at the 8B scale. These results show that, in multimodal on-policy distillation, the design of teacher privilege is as important as teacher strength.
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