RL makes MLLMs see better than SFT
Authors: name: Junha Song; name: Sangdoo Yun; name: Dongyoon Han; name: Jaegul Choo; name: Byeongho Heo
Published: 2025-10-18 03:37:17

Abstract: A dominant assumption in Multimodal Language Model (MLLM) research is that
its performance is largely inherited from the LLM backbone, given its immense
parameter scale and remarkable capabilities. This has created a void in the
understanding of the vision encoder, which determines how MLLMs perceive
images. The recent shift in MLLM training paradigms, from Supervised Finetuning
(SFT) to Reinforcement Learning (RL), magnifies this oversight-namely, the
significant lack of analysis on how such training reshapes the vision encoder
as well as the MLLM. To address this, we first investigate the impact of
training strategies on MLLMs, where RL shows a clear advantage over SFT in
strongly vision-related VQA benchmarks. Motivated by this, we conduct a
critical yet under-explored analysis of the vision encoder of MLLMs through
diverse and in-depth experiments, ranging from ImageNet classification and
segmentation to gradient visualization. Our results demonstrate that MLLM's
post-training strategy (i.e., SFT or RL) not only leads to distinct outcomes on
MLLM downstream tasks, but also fundamentally reshapes MLLM's underlying visual
representations. Specifically, the key finding of our study is that RL produces
stronger and precisely localized visual representations compared to SFT,
boosting the ability of the vision encoder for MLLM. We then reframe our
findings into a simple recipe for building strong vision encoders for MLLMs,
Preference-Instructed Vision OpTimization (PIVOT). When integrated into MLLMs,
a PIVOT-trained vision encoder outperforms even larger and more heavily-trained
counterparts, despite requiring less than 1% of the computational cost of
standard vision pretraining. This result opens an effective and efficient path
for advancing the vision backbones of MLLMs. Project page available at
https://june-page.github.io/pivot/