Latent-OPD is proposed, which augments OPD with trajectory-level latent distillation and introduces a progressive teacher-lookahead strategy, which aligns middle-to-late student layers with increasingly deeper teacher layers, establishing Latent-OPD as a highly effective approach to frame-efficient video reasoning.
Abstract
Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) for video reasoning have long been hindered by the high computational cost of processing vast amounts of visual information. This dilemma motivates the transfer of the reasoning capabilities of large models to smaller, more efficient ones. On-Policy Distillation (OPD) offers a promising solution by matching output-token distributions along student-generated trajectories. However, video reasoning often depends on evidence accumulated across multiple frames. In this context, output-level supervision only captures information expressed through token predictions and does not directly constrain the latent representations formed during reasoning. To address this limitation, we propose Latent-OPD, which augments OPD with trajectory-level latent distillation. Specifically, our method focuses on the position at the end of each trajectory, where hidden states effectively summarize the accumulated visual evidence and reasoning context. Furthermore, we introduce a progressive teacher-lookahead strategy, which aligns middle-to-late student layers with increasingly deeper teacher layers. Experiments on six video reasoning benchmarks show that Latent-OPD consistently outperforms output-only OPD. Notably, the improvements are particularly pronounced in scenarios with limited frames, long videos, or tasks requiring complex evidence aggregation. These results establish Latent-OPD as a highly effective approach to frame-efficient video reasoning.
Multimodal Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in cross-modal understanding, yet a fundamental challenge persists when applying them to recommendation: as representations propagate through multi-step reasoning, both visual and textual signals progressively attenuate - a phenomenon we term cross-modal dilution. To address this, we propose LARK (Latent-Aligned Reasoning frameworK), a two-stage latent reasoning framework with complementary alignment mechanisms within a single VLM. In the first stage, learnable latent tokens are interleaved with multi-step chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning and explicitly aligned with a frozen vision encoder, serving as visual checkpoints that preserve perceptual details throughout the reasoning chain. In the second stage, the latent representations are projected via a bridge MLP and trained with item-to-item contrastive learning; to prevent the reasoning semantics from fading, intermediate features are aligned with the CoT hidden states from the first stage, anchoring the final embeddings to the model's own reasoning output. Experiments on three public benchmarks and one industrial dataset show that LARK achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple recommendation architectures, with controlled ablations confirming the distinct contribution of each component.
Experiments on perception-intensive visual reasoning benchmarks show that LUT outperforms previous latent reasoning methods and remains competitive with latent-text interleaved methods with lower annotation cost.
Interleaved multimodal Chain-of-Thought (CoT) improves visual reasoning by incorporating auxiliary visual evidence into intermediate reasoning. However, existing approaches remain constrained by externally defined reasoning traces and visual operations, limiting their ability to develop flexible and abstract visual thinking. Reasoning with latent has recently offered a promising direction by internalizing intermediate computation into continuous representations. Nevertheless, existing visual-latent methods mainly supervise latent states through alignment with compressed auxiliary visual features, treating them as proxies for visual observations rather than active reasoning states. Consequently, they capture the provided evidence but fail to fully internalize the abstract reasoning process induced by multimodal CoT. In this paper, we propose OPLD (On-Policy Latent Distillation), a simple framework that transfers the reasoning capability induced by privileged multimodal CoT into latent reasoning representations. Extensive experiments on diverse multimodal benchmarks demonstrate that OPLD consistently outperforms existing latent reasoning methods and achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple benchmarks. The results suggest that supervising latent representations at the reasoning-process level provides a more effective paradigm for multimodal latent reasoning than conventional feature-level alignment.
Shoutai Zhu, Tianyang Xu, Bingchuan Sun et al.· arXiv.org· 0 citations
Clue-OPSD, a clue-privileged on-policy self-distillation framework for long-video understanding that uses clue intervals as privileged supervision without relying on ground-truth answer labels, while requiring no clue annotations or additional modules at inference time is introduced.
Kaishen Wang, Dong-Di Zhao, Yijun Liang et al.· 0 citations
Experimental results demonstrate that S2V can consistently improve LVU performance across multiple LVU benchmarks, outperforming both general MLLMs and reasoning-based methods not only in LVU accuracy but also in training and inference efficiency.
Beibei Zhang, Chao Xu, Jun Lan et al.· 0 citations
TRAM (TRajectory-derived Auxiliary Memory), a training-free method that augments standard decoding with an auxiliary memory pathway derived from the model's own reasoning trajectory, shows that TRAM improves performance over vanilla decoding on mathematical, scientific, and general visual reasoning tasks without additional training.
Kang Liu, Zijing Wang, Yongkang Liu et al.· 0 citations
Related blog posts
MIT News · Artificial Intelligence· news.mit.eduJun 3, 2026
The new ChartNet training dataset could improve the accuracy of vision-language models that help analyze business trends or interpret scientific figures.
