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arxiv:2611.12886

Reframe: Observation-Aligned Multi-Teacher On-Policy Distillation for Agentic Visual Reasoning

Published on Nov 9
· Submitted by
Haozhi Yuan
on Nov 10
Authors:
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Abstract

Reframe is a two-stage post-training framework that aligns visual agents’ observation states through evidence-aware reinforcement learning and observation-gated on-policy distillation, improving tool use and outperforming Mix-RL and vanilla MOPD across image and video benchmarks.

Agentic reinforcement learning (RL) and multi-teacher on-policy distillation (MOPD) offer complementary routes to post-training. For visual agents, however, tool use presents two related challenges. Models may overlook useful tool-returned observations, while poorly grounded actions can limit the evidence available for subsequent distillation. We introduce Reframe, a post-training framework that treats the observation state, rather than only the output distribution, as an object of alignment. First, Ground-Drop-GRPO (GD-GRPO) trains spatial and temporal specialists with evidence-aware rewards and stochastic removal of the original visual input, encouraging them to acquire grounded evidence and use the returned observations. Second, Observation-Gated-MOPD (OG-MOPD) replaces deficient tool actions with canonical ones mid-rollout and resumes distillation from the repaired observation. The two stages complement each other, as learning to rely on tool-returned observations can help the policy benefit from observation repair. Neither stage requires a task-specific SFT cold start. Extensive experiments over 14 image and video benchmarks demonstrate that Reframe outperforms both Mix-RL and vanilla MOPD. Ablation results show that GD-GRPO increases observation dependence and tool gain compared with outcome-based GRPO.

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Reframe learns to acquire useful visual evidence, then use it. Built on Qwen3.5-9B, with no SFT cold start.

  • GD-GRPO makes the observation necessary: grounding rewards on tool actions, plus stochastic removal of the original visual input, so the model has to reason from what the tool returned.
  • OG-MOPD keeps the observation valid: deficient tool actions are repaired mid-rollout, so multi-teacher distillation continues from useful observations.

The idea of aligning the observation state, not just the output distribution, clicked for me: a model that ignores what its tool just returned is a very human habit. Replacing a bad tool action mid-rollout with a canonical one is a neat trick. Does it hurt when the canonical action is not actually the best one for that case?

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