ViCuR: Visual Cues as Recoverable Privilege for Multimodal On-Policy Distillation

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2606.05718v1
• Date: Thu, 04 Jun 2026 05:18:13 GMT
• Title: ViCuR: Visual Cues as Recoverable Privilege for Multimodal On-Policy Distillation
• Abstract summary: ViCuR is a visually grounded privileged-teacher distillation framework.<n>It replaces answer-side privilege with visual cues.<n>It consistently improves over answer-based on-policy self-distillation.
• Score: 5.131753844398592
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: 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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