Fine-grained visual perception remains a bottleneck during post-training of multimodal large language models (MLLMs), as perceptual errors can constrain gains from reasoning-focused optimization. Although image-caption pre-training improves perception, its influence can weaken as subsequent stages change data mixtures and objectives. Continuing caption supervision during post-training is challenging because subjective, information-dense descriptions complicate verifiable reward design. We present PerceptRL, which strengthens perception at two complementary levels. Perception RL uses a multi-agent pipeline to extract verified errors from dense image captions and convert the corresponding visual facts into QA pairs with fixed answer labels and rule-based rewards. Chain QA links correlated errors, while multiple-choice QA combines unrelated errors. A specialized route targets high-error domains with tailored verification, and a domain-agnostic general route covers errors beyond these domains. Perception Agentic RL addresses fine-grained and dense cases unresolved by single-turn Perception RL through multi-turn inspection with visual tools. We observe coordinate drift even in models trained to use tools, where incorrect crops or annotations distort evidence and propagate errors. Coordinate Injection corrects spatial operations in cold-start trajectories, while a grounding-aware process reward supervises intermediate spatial fidelity alongside final-answer correctness. Training proceeds through shared cold-start SFT, single-turn Perception RL, and multi-turn Perception Agentic RL. Across seven benchmarks under a shared tool-use protocol, PerceptRL achieves 71.6% average accuracy, surpassing the base model with the same tools and the strongest evaluated frontier VLM by 15.7 and 5.2 percentage points, respectively.
Yifan Ji, Zhipeng Xu, Zhenghao Liu Northeastern University, Zulong Chen, Qian Zhang Alibaba Group, Zhibo Yang, Junyang Lin Alibaba Group, Yu Gu 等 10 位作者
Key Information Extraction (KIE) from real-world documents remains challenging due to substantial variations in layout structures, visual quality, and task-specific information requirements. Recent Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have shown promising potential for performing end-to-end KIE directly from document images. To enable a comprehensive and systematic evaluation across realistic and diverse application scenarios, we introduce UNIKIE-BENCH, a unified benchmark designed to rigorously evaluate the KIE capabilities of LMMs. UNIKIE-BENCH consists of two complementary tracks: a constrained-category KIE track with scenario-predefined schemas that reflect practical application needs, and an open-category KIE track that extracts any key information that is explicitly present in the document. Experiments on 15 state-of-the-art LMMs reveal substantial performance degradation under diverse schema definitions, long-tail key fields, and complex layouts, along with pronounced performance disparities across different document types and scenarios. These findings underscore persistent challenges in grounding accuracy and layout-aware reasoning for LMM-based KIE. All codes and datasets are available at https://github.com/NEUIR/UNIKIE-BENCH.
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cs.CL · cs.CV
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Songtao Jiang, Yuan Wang, Ruizhe Chen, Yan Zhang ByteDance Inc., Ruilin Luo, Bohan Lei Zhejiang University, Yeying Jin, Sibo Song Alibaba Group 等 12 位作者
While reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards (RLVR) has been proven highly effective for enhancing reasoning, its application to medical visual question answering (Med-VQA) is hampered by models producing reasoning inconsistent with either the visual evidence or the final answer. Our analysis reveals a critical flaw in RLVR training: it paradoxically encourages models to disregard visual evidence and generate answers that contradict their own reasoning. This degradation is most pronounced in specialized medical modalities (e.g., Fundus, Ultrasound) where base VLMs lack robust understanding, a failure we attribute to a flawed reward mechanism exacerbated by the scarcity of diverse training data. To tackle this, we introduce Med-Zero-17K, a large-scale dataset spanning over 30 modalities and 24 clinically relevant tasks, and the Multi-Consistency Reward (MCR) framework, which explicitly rewards both perceptual grounding and logical coherence. Extensive experiments validate our approach: integrating MCR into the RLVR framework delivers robust performance gains. This success stems from our crucial finding that rewarding internal consistency is significantly more effective than attempting to judge reasoning correctness. Furthermore, MCR proves highly versatile, exhibiting strong generalization across diverse VLM backbones, compatibility with RL algorithms like GRPO and DPO, and extending its effectiveness to 3D VQA tasks and R1-style training paradigms. Code and dataset will be released.
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Xinda Wang Peking University, Zhengxu Hou, Yangshijie Zhang Lanzhou University, Yanbingren Alibaba Group, Jialin Liu, ChenZhuo Zhao, Zhibo Yang, Bin-Bin Yang Alibaba Group 等 9 位作者
Although the effectiveness of Large Language Models as judges has been validated, their performance remains limited in open-ended tasks, particularly in story evaluation. Accurate story evaluation is crucial not only for assisting human quality judgment but also for providing reward signals to guide story generation. However, existing methods face a dilemma: prompt engineering for closed-source models suffers from poor adaptability, while fine-tuning approaches for open-source models lack the reasoning capabilities essential for story evaluation. To address this, we propose the Self-Evolving Pairwise Reasoning (EvolvR) framework. Grounded in pairwise comparison, the framework first self-synthesizes score-aligned Chain-of-Thought (CoT) data via a multi-persona strategy. To ensure data quality, these raw CoTs undergo a self-filtering process, utilizing multi-agents to guarantee their logical rigor and robustness. Finally, the evaluator trained on the refined data is deployed as a reward model to guide the story generation task. Experimental results demonstrate that our framework achieves state-of-the-art performance on three evaluation benchmarks including StoryER, HANNA and OpenMEVA. Furthermore, when served as a reward model, it enhances the quality of generated stories, thereby validating the superiority of our self-evolving approach.
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cs.CL · cs.MA
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Xinda Wang Peking University, Zhengxu Hou, Yangshijie Zhang Lanzhou University, Yanbingren Alibaba Group, Jialin Liu, ChenZhuo Zhao, Zhibo Yang, Bin-Bin Yang Alibaba Group 等 9 位作者
Reinforcement learning for open-ended text generation is constrained by the lack of verifiable rewards, necessitating reliance on judge models that require either annotated data or powerful closed-source models. Inspired by recent work on unsupervised reinforcement learning for mathematical reasoning using confidence-based endogenous rewards, we investigate whether this principle can be adapted to open-ended writing tasks. We find that directly applying confidence rewards leads to Triviality Bias: the policy collapses toward high-probability outputs, reducing diversity and meaningful content. We propose TCER (Triviality Corrected Endogenous Reward), which addresses this bias by rewarding the relative information gain between a specialist policy and a generalist reference policy, modulated by a probability-dependent correction mechanism. Across multiple writing benchmarks and model architectures, TCER achieves consistent improvements without external supervision. Furthermore, TCER also transfers effectively to mathematical reasoning, validating the generality of our approach across different generation tasks.
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表