Reframe: Observation-Aligned Multi-Teacher On-Policy Distillation for Agentic Visual Reasoning
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.
Community
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?
This is an automated message from the Librarian Bot. I found the following papers similar to this paper.
The following papers were recommended by the Semantic Scholar API
- MeSD: Multi-Evidence Self-Distillation for VideoLLM (2026)
- On-Policy Visual Evidence Distillation (2026)
- VISTA: Internalizing Collective Visual Experience via On-Policy Distillation for Active Multimodal Agents (2026)
- PerceptRL: Making Visual Perception Rewardable in MLLMs from Answers to Interactions (2026)
- VC-OPD: Visual Counterfactual On-Policy Distillation for Grounded Vision-Language Reasoning (2026)
- Learning Where to Look: Observation Policy Optimization for Thinking with Images (2026)
- Reinforcement Learning with Visually Attributable On-Policy Self-Distillation (2026)
Please give a thumbs up to this comment if you found it helpful!
If you want recommendations for any Paper on Hugging Face checkout this Space
You can directly ask Librarian Bot for paper recommendations by tagging it in a comment: @librarian-bot recommend
Get this paper in your agent:
hf papers read 2611.12886 Don't have the latest CLI?
curl -LsSf https://hf.co/cli/install.sh | bash Models citing this paper 0
No model linking this paper
Datasets citing this paper 0
No dataset linking this paper
Spaces citing this paper 0
No Space linking this paper