Yanbiao Ma
Publications
SVSR: A Self-Verification and Self-Rectification Paradigm for Multimodal Reasoning
Current multimodal models often suffer from shallow reasoning, leading to errors caused by incomplete or inconsistent thought processes. To address this limitation, we propose Self-Verification and Self-Rectification (SVSR), a unified framework that explicitly integrates self-verification and self-rectification into the model's reasoning pipeline, substantially improving robustness and reliability in complex visual understanding and multimodal reasoning tasks. SVSR is built on a novel three-stage training paradigm. First, we construct a high-quality unified preference dataset by refining reasoning traces from pre-trained vision-language models, incorporating both forward and backward reasoning to embed self-reflective signals. Second, we perform cold-start supervised fine-tuning on this dataset to learn structured, multi-step reasoning behaviors. Third, we apply a Semi-online Direct Preference Optimization (Semi-online DPO) process, continuously augmenting the training corpus with high-quality, model-generated reasoning traces filtered by a powerful teacher VLM. This pipeline enables the model to learn, elicit, and refine its ability to self-verify and self-rectify. Extensive experiments across diverse benchmarks demonstrate that SVSR improves reasoning accuracy and enables stronger generalization to unseen tasks and question types. Notably, once trained with explicit self-reflective reasoning, the model also exhibits improved implicit reasoning ability, outperforming strong baselines even when no explicit reasoning traces are provided. These results highlight the potential of SVSR for building more dependable, introspective, and cognitively aligned multimodal systems.
Cognitive Pivot Points and Visual Anchoring: Unveiling and Rectifying Hallucinations in Multimodal Reasoning Models
Multimodal Large Reasoning Models (MLRMs) have achieved remarkable strides in visual reasoning through test time compute scaling, yet long chain reasoning remains prone to hallucinations. We identify a concerning phenomenon termed the Reasoning Vision Truth Disconnect (RVTD): hallucinations are strongly correlated with cognitive bifurcation points that often exhibit high entropy states. We attribute this vulnerability to a breakdown in visual semantic anchoring, localized within the network's intermediate layers; specifically, during these high uncertainty transitions, the model fails to query visual evidence, reverting instead to language priors. Consequently, we advocate a shift from solely outcome level supervision to augmenting it with fine grained internal attention guidance. To this end, we propose V-STAR (Visual Structural Training with Attention Reinforcement), a lightweight, holistic training paradigm designed to internalize visually aware reasoning capabilities. Central to our approach is the Hierarchical Visual Attention Reward (HVAR), integrated within the GRPO framework. Upon detecting high entropy states, this mechanism dynamically incentivizes visual attention across critical intermediate layers, thereby anchoring the reasoning process back to the visual input. Furthermore, we introduce the Forced Reflection Mechanism (FRM), a trajectory editing strategy that disrupts cognitive inertia by triggering reflection around high entropy cognitive bifurcation points and encouraging verification of subsequent steps against the visual input, thereby translating external debiasing interventions into an intrinsic capability for hallucination mitigation.
MathDoc: Benchmarking Structured Extraction and Active Refusal on Noisy Mathematics Exam Papers
The automated extraction of structured questions from paper-based mathematics exams is fundamental to intelligent education, yet remains challenging in real-world settings due to severe visual noise. Existing benchmarks mainly focus on clean documents or generic layout analysis, overlooking both the structural integrity of mathematical problems and the ability of models to actively reject incomplete inputs. We introduce MathDoc, the first benchmark for document-level information extraction from authentic high school mathematics exam papers. MathDoc contains \textbf{3,609} carefully curated questions with real-world artifacts and explicitly includes unrecognizable samples to evaluate active refusal behavior. We propose a multi-dimensional evaluation framework covering stem accuracy, visual similarity, and refusal capability. Experiments on SOTA MLLMs, including Qwen3-VL and Gemini-2.5-Pro, show that although end-to-end models achieve strong extraction performance, they consistently fail to refuse illegible inputs, instead producing confident but invalid outputs. These results highlight a critical gap in current MLLMs and establish MathDoc as a benchmark for assessing model reliability under degraded document conditions. Our project repository is available at \href{https://github.com/winnk123/papers/tree/master}{GitHub repository}