Perception-Consistency Multimodal Large Language Models Reasoning via Caption-Regularized Policy Optimization

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2509.21854v1
• Date: Fri, 26 Sep 2025 04:32:26 GMT
• Title: Perception-Consistency Multimodal Large Language Models Reasoning via Caption-Regularized Policy Optimization
• Abstract summary: multimodal large language models excel at tasks that integrate visual perception with symbolic reasoning.<n>CapPO integrates two key mechanisms: (1) a caption-based consistency regularization, which minimizes the divergence between responses conditioned on raw images and those conditioned on captions, and (2) a KL-weighted advantage estimation scheme, which adaptively scales reinforcement signals to strengthen perceptually consistent trajectories.
• Score: 72.30168853571216
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
• Abstract: While multimodal large language models excel at tasks that integrate visual perception with symbolic reasoning, their performance is often undermined by a critical vulnerability: perception-induced errors that propagate through the reasoning chain. Current reinforcement learning (RL) fine-tuning methods, while enhancing reasoning abilities, largely fail to address the underlying misalignment between visual grounding and the subsequent reasoning process. To address this challenge, we propose \textbf{Caption-Regularized Policy Optimization (CapPO)}, a novel RL framework that explicitly enforces perceptual consistency during policy optimization. CapPO integrates two key mechanisms: (1) a caption-based consistency regularization, which minimizes the divergence between responses conditioned on raw images and those conditioned on captions, thereby anchoring reasoning to semantically faithful visual content; and (2) a KL-weighted advantage estimation scheme, which adaptively scales reinforcement signals to strengthen perceptually consistent trajectories while suppressing spurious correlations. Extensive experiments on five math-focused and five general reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that CapPO achieves competitive performance, yielding gains of +6.0% accuracy on math-related tasks and +2.4% on general reasoning tasks over the base Qwen2.5-VL-7B model. Moreover, ablation studies further confirm the effectiveness of each component, while error analysis reveals that CapPO significantly reduces perception-related mistakes compared with baselines. Overall, CapPO provides a simple yet effective framework for improving multimodal reasoning.

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