Paper Detail

Improving Vision-language Models with Perception-centric Process Reward Models

Yingqian Min, Kun Zhou, Yifan Li, Yuhuan Wu, Han Peng, Yifan Du, Wayne Xin Zhao, Min Yang, Ji-Rong Wen

huggingface Score 17.5

Published 2026-04-27 · First seen 2026-04-28

General AI

Abstract

Recent advancements in reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) have significantly improved the complex reasoning ability of vision-language models (VLMs). However, its outcome-level supervision is too coarse to diagnose and correct errors within the reasoning chain. To this end, we propose Perceval, a process reward model (PRM) that enables token-level error grounding, which can extract image-related claims from the response and compare them one by one with the visual evidence in the image, ultimately returning claims that contain perceptual errors. Perceval is trained with perception-intensive supervised training data. We then integrate Perceval into the RL training process to train the policy models. Specifically, compared to traditional GRPO, which applies sequence-level advantages, we apply token-level advantages by targeting penalties on hallucinated spans identified by Perceval, thus enabling fine-grained supervision signals. In addition to augmenting the training process, Perceval can also assist VLMs during the inference stage. Using Perceval, we can truncate the erroneous portions of the model's response, and then either have the model regenerate the response directly or induce the model to reflect on its previous output. This process can be repeated multiple times to achieve test-time scaling. Experiments show significant improvements on benchmarks from various domains across multiple reasoning VLMs trained with RL, highlighting the promise of perception-centric supervision as a general-purpose strategy. For test-time scaling, it also demonstrates consistent performance gains over other strategies, such as major voting. Our code and data will be publicly released at https://github.com/RUCAIBox/Perceval.

Workflow Status

Review status
pending
Role
unreviewed
Read priority
now
Vote
Not set.
Saved
no
Collections
Not filed yet.
Next action
Not filled yet.

Reading Brief

No structured notes yet. Add `summary_sections`, `why_relevant`, `claim_impact`, or `next_action` in `papers.jsonl` to enrich this view.

Why It Surfaced

No ranking explanation is available yet.

Tags

No tags.

BibTeX

@misc{min2026improving,
  title = {Improving Vision-language Models with Perception-centric Process Reward Models},
  author = {Yingqian Min and Kun Zhou and Yifan Li and Yuhuan Wu and Han Peng and Yifan Du and Wayne Xin Zhao and Min Yang and Ji-Rong Wen},
  year = {2026},
  abstract = {Recent advancements in reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) have significantly improved the complex reasoning ability of vision-language models (VLMs). However, its outcome-level supervision is too coarse to diagnose and correct errors within the reasoning chain. To this end, we propose Perceval, a process reward model (PRM) that enables token-level error grounding, which can extract image-related claims from the response and compare them one by one with the visual evidence in t},
  url = {https://huggingface.co/papers/2604.24583},
  keywords = {reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards, vision-language models, process reward model, token-level error grounding, perception-intensive supervised training, sequence-level advantages, token-level advantages, hallucinated spans, test-time scaling, major voting, huggingface daily},
  eprint = {2604.24583},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
}

Metadata

{}