aiqbench analysis
This research introduces MeSD, a novel self-distillation framework for VideoLLMs that resolves the limitations of sequence-level rewards by leveraging multi-evidence teachers for dense token-level supervision. By incorporating verification-guided optimization to distinguish between successful, failed, and indeterminate trajectories, the method effectively refines model updates using both reward signals and corrective feedback from specific evidence types. Experimental results on multiple video benchmarks demonstrate consistent performance gains over standard reinforcement learning and self-distillation baselines, advancing the state of multimodal video understanding.
MeSD: Multi-Evidence Self-Distillation for VideoLLM
arXiv:2610.06342v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards provides reliable outcome supervision for VideoLLMs, sequence-level rewards offer limited token-level guidance. On-policy self-distillation addresses this limitation by conditioning a self-teacher on privileged information to provide dense token-level supervision. However, aggregating heterogeneous evidence within a single teacher context obscures cross-evidence agreement and conflict. A further challenge lies in determining whether teacher guidance should refine reward-based updates or provide corrective supervision for failed trajectories. To address these issues, we propose MeSD, a multi-evidence self-distillation framework for VideoLLMs. MeSD constructs three evidence-conditioned teachers with shared parameters, using the ground-truth answer as a common semantic context while separately incorporating temporal and spatial evidence. Given the same student-generated prefixes, MeSD evaluates evidence-specific preferences relative to the Answer Teacher and fuses teacher-common preferences with gated teacher-specific residuals. Furthermore, MeSD introduces Verification-Guided Optimization to classify trajectories as Success, Failure, or Indeterminate. For Success and Indeterminate trajectories, MeSD refines token-level advantage magnitudes while preserving reward-derived signs. For verified failure trajectories that contain the required evidence, MeSD applies failure-conditioned distillation, using reverse-KL correction toward the fused distribution. Experiments on multiple video benchmarks demonstrate consistent gains over reinforcement learning and self-distillation baselines.
Abstract:While reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards provides reliable outcome supervision for VideoLLMs, sequence-level rewards offer limited token-level guidance. On-policy self-distillation addresses this limitation by conditioning a self-teacher on privileged information to provide dense token-level supervision. However, aggregating heterogeneous evidence within a single teacher context obscures cross-evidence agreement and conflict. A further challenge lies in determining whether teacher guidance should refine reward-based updates or provide corrective supervision for failed trajectories. To address these issues, we propose MeSD, a multi-evidence self-distillation framework for VideoLLMs. MeSD constructs three evidence-conditioned teachers with shared parameters, using the ground-truth answer as a common semantic context while separately incorporating temporal and spatial evidence. Given the same student-generated prefixes, MeSD evaluates evidence-specific preferences relative to the Answer Teacher and fuses teacher-common preferences with gated teacher-specific residuals. Furthermore, MeSD introduces Verification-Guided Optimization to classify trajectories as Success, Failure, or Indeterminate. For Success and Indeterminate trajectories, MeSD refines token-level advantage magnitudes while preserving reward-derived signs. For verified failure trajectories that contain the required evidence, MeSD applies failure-conditioned distillation, using reverse-KL correction toward the fused distribution. Experiments on multiple video benchmarks demonstrate consistent gains over reinforcement learning and self-distillation baselines.
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)
arXiv:2610.06342 [cs.CV]
(or arXiv:2610.06342v1 [cs.CV] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.06342 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
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Full text under the publisher's open licence · 289 words
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