arXiv:2609.04947cs.CVcs.AI2026-09

用跨模态对比优化压缩多模态推理链,省时省显存还更准。

MCPO: Modality-Contrastive Preference Optimization for Multimodal Chain-of-Thought Compression

论文配图:MCPO: Modality-Contrastive Preference Optimization for Multimodal Chain-of-Thought Compression
图 1 · 摘自论文原文
  • 通过比较有图和无图时的推理差异,自动删掉无关视觉的冗余步骤。
  • 推理链缩短69.5%,端到端推理速度提升3.34倍,准确率不变。
  • 适合需要高效多模态推理的部署场景,尤其在资源受限环境。

多模态大模型虽能通过长推理链解决复杂任务,但过长的推理过程带来巨大计算开销与显存压力。现有压缩与对齐方法依赖静态规则或单维度偏好,缺乏细粒度跨模态约束,易引发视觉懒惰与幻觉推理。为此,我们提出模态对比偏好优化(MCPO),一种仅需少于900个样本的两阶段高效压缩方法。第一阶段采用步级归一化跨模态互信息(NCMI)剪枝算法,通过对比有图与无图上下文下的推理差异,自动识别并移除视觉无关的推理步骤,显著减少冗余与幻觉内容。第二阶段先进行监督微调实现领域自适应初始化,再使用非对称多模态长度控制偏好损失进行优化,该目标采用高度非线性几率比形式,在有图情境中提供陡峭梯度以强化长度约束,而在无图情境中采用缩放平缓梯度的线性差值,维持模态一致性,实现稳定跨模态偏好对齐。在Qwen3-VL-Thinking等主流基线模型上的实验表明,本方法可将推理链长度压缩达69.5%,实现最高3.34倍端到端推理加速,同时保持原始准确率。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Recently, multimodal large-scale reasoning models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in solving complex tasks through long Chains-of-Thought (M-CoT). However, excessively long reasoning trajectories incur substantial computational costs and significant KV-cache pressure. Existing CoT compression and alignment paradigms mainly rely on static rules or single-dimensional preferences, lacking fine-grained cross-modal constraints; as a result, they are prone to inducing visual laziness and hallucinatory reasoning. To address these issues, we propose Modality-Contrastive Preference Optimization (MCPO), a highly sample-efficient two-stage length-compression method that requires fewer than 900 training samples. In the compression stage, we introduce a step-level Normalized Cross-Modal Mutual Information (NCMI) pruning algorithm, which automatically identifies and removes visual-independent reasoning steps by comparing the reasoning discrepancies between with-image and no-image contexts. This significantly reduces redundancy and hallucinatory content in the reasoning chains. In the alignment stage, the model first undergoes supervised fine-tuning to achieve domain-adaptive initialization, followed by optimization using an asymmetric multimodal length-controlled preference loss. This objective adopts a highly nonlinear odds-ratio formulation that provides steep gradients in the with-image context to reinforce length constraints for preferred trajectories, while applying a scaled, flat-gradient linear difference in the no-image context to maintain modality consistency, thereby achieving stable cross-modal preference alignment. Extensive experiments on mainstream base models such as Qwen3-VL-Thinking show that our method can reduce CoT length by up to 69.5% and achieve up to 3.34x end-to-end inference speedup while preserving original accuracy.

多模态推理压缩偏好优化高效推理

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