OmniOPSD: Rationale-Privileged On-Policy Self-Distillation for Affective Computing

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2606.15920v1
• Date: Sun, 14 Jun 2026 16:51:22 GMT
• Title: OmniOPSD: Rationale-Privileged On-Policy Self-Distillation for Affective Computing
• Abstract summary: Reinforcement learning for large language models is often hindered by severe reward sparsity in complex reasoning tasks.<n>We propose OmniOPSD, a framework that uses frontier-generated rationales as teacher-side privileged evidence.<n>Experiments on MER-UniBench show that OmniOPSD achieves state-of-the-art performance with an average score of $84.19$.
• Score: 62.62736813348113
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Reinforcement learning for multimodal large language models (MLLMs) is often hindered by severe reward sparsity in complex reasoning tasks. This challenge is particularly pronounced in human-centered scenarios involving states, emotions, intentions, and behaviors, where heterogeneous multimodal signals and subjective human factors make high-quality chain-of-thought (CoT) annotations expensive and difficult to obtain. Although many multimodal datasets provide expert-annotated ground-truth labels, directly using these labels for supervised fine-tuning may encourage shortcut learning in multimodal perception and provides limited transparency for safety-critical human--AI interaction. To address these limitations, we propose OmniOPSD, a Rationale-Privileged On-Policy Self-Distillation framework that uses frontier-generated rationales as teacher-side privileged evidence rather than student imitation targets. OmniOPSD uses frontier-generated evidence-aware rationales only as training-time privileged evidence context for a local teacher. The student samples its own rollout from the original multimodal input, while the rationale-privileged teacher scores the same tokens and provides dense token-level supervision. Thus, the student learns on its own trajectory distribution without directly imitating frontier-model completions, and inference requires no labels, rationales, CoT annotations, or closed-source model access. Experiments on MER-UniBench show that OmniOPSD achieves state-of-the-art performance with an average score of $84.19$, and ablations further support the value of rationale-privileged teacher guidance.

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