Author name cluster

Yana Wei

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4 papers

2 author rows

NeurIPS Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Open Vision Reasoner: Transferring Linguistic Cognitive Behavior for Visual Reasoning

Yana Wei
Liang Zhao
Jianjian Sun
Kangheng Lin
jisheng yin
Jingcheng Hu
Yinmin Zhang
En Yu

The remarkable reasoning capability of large language models (LLMs) stems from cognitive behaviors that emerge through reinforcement with verifiable rewards. This work investigates how to transfer this principle to Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) to unlock advanced visual reasoning. We introduce a two-stage paradigm built on Qwen2. 5-VL-7B: a massive linguistic cold-start fine-tuning, followed by multimodal reinforcement learning (RL) spanning nearly 1, 000 steps—surpassing all previous open-source efforts in scale. This pioneering work reveals three fundamental insights: 1) Behavior transfer emerges surprisingly early in cold start due to linguistic mental imagery. 2) Cold start broadly memorizes visual behaviors, while RL critically discerns and scales up effective patterns. 3) Transfer strategically favors high-utility behaviors such as visual reflection. Our resulting model, Open-Vision-Reasoner (OVR), achieves state-of-the-art performance on a suite of reasoning benchmarks, including 95. 3% on MATH500, 51. 8% on MathVision and 54. 6% on MathVerse. We release our model, data, and training dynamics to catalyze the development of more capable, behavior-aligned multimodal reasoners.

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ICML Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Perception in Reflection

Yana Wei
Liang Zhao
Kangheng Lin
En Yu
Yuang Peng
Runpei Dong
Jianjian Sun
Haoran Wei

We present a perception in reflection paradigm designed to transcend the limitations of current large vision-language models (LVLMs), which are expected yet often fail to achieve perfect perception initially. Specifically, we propose Reflective Perception (RePer), a dual-model reflection mechanism that systematically alternates between policy and critic models, enables iterative refinement of visual perception. This framework is powered by Reflective Perceptual Learning (RPL), which reinforces intrinsic reflective capabilities through a methodically constructed visual reflection dataset and reflective unlikelihood training Comprehensive experimental evaluation demonstrates RePer’s quantifiable improvements in image understanding, captioning precision, and hallucination reduction. Notably, RePer achieves strong alignment between model attention patterns and human visual focus, while RPL optimizes fine-grained and free-form preference alignment. These advancements establish perception in reflection as a robust paradigm for future multimodal agents, particularly in tasks requiring complex reasoning and multi-step manipulation. Project Page: https: //weiyana. github. io/Perception-in-Reflection

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NeurIPS Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Perception-R1: Pioneering Perception Policy with Reinforcement Learning

En Yu
Kangheng Lin
Liang Zhao
jisheng yin
Yana Wei
Yuang Peng
Haoran Wei
Jianjian Sun

Inspired by the success of DeepSeek-R1, we explore the potential of rule-based reinforcement learning (RL) in MLLM post-training for perception policy learning. While promising, our initial experiments reveal that incorporating a thinking process through RL does not consistently lead to performance gains across all visual perception tasks. This leads us to delve into the essential role of RL in the context of visual perception. In this work, we return to the fundamentals and explore the effects of RL on different perception tasks. We observe that the perceptual perplexity is a major factor in determining the effectiveness of RL. We also observe that reward design plays a crucial role in further approaching the upper limit of model perception. To leverage these findings, we propose Perception-R1, a scalable RL framework using GRPO during MLLM post-training. With a standard Qwen2-VL-2B-Instruct, Perception-R1 achieves +4. 2% on RefCOCO+, +17. 9% on PixMo-Count, +4. 2% on PageOCR, and notably, 31. 9% AP on COCO2017 val for the first time, establishing a strong baseline for perception policy learning.

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ICLR Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Unhackable Temporal Reward for Scalable Video MLLMs

En Yu
Kangheng Lin
Liang Zhao
Yana Wei
Zining Zhu 0004
Haoran Wei
Jianjian Sun
Zheng Ge

In the pursuit of superior video-processing MLLMs, we have encountered a perplexing paradox: the “anti-scaling law”, where more data and larger models lead to worse performance. This study unmasks the culprit: “temporal hacking”, a phenomenon where models shortcut by fixating on select frames, missing the full video narrative. In this work, we systematically establish a comprehensive theory of temporal hacking, defining it from a reinforcement learning perspective, introducing the Temporal Perplexity (TPL) score to assess this misalignment, and proposing the Unhackable Temporal Rewarding (UTR) framework to mitigate the temporal hacking. Both theoretically and empirically, TPL proves to be a reliable indicator of temporal modeling quality, correlating strongly with frame activation patterns. Extensive experiments reveal that UTR not only counters temporal hacking but significantly elevates video comprehension capabilities. This work not only advances video-AI systems but also illuminates the critical importance of aligning proxy rewards with true objectives in MLLM development.

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