Title: SPECS: Decoupling Multimodal Learning via  Self-distilled Preference-based Cold Start
Primary area: foundation or frontier models, including LLMs
Keywords: Vision Language Models, Reinforcement Learning, Reasoning, Cold-Start, Preference Optimization, Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), Self-Distillation

Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) with verifiable rewards has recently catalyzed a wave of “MLLM-r1” approaches that bring RL to vision language models. Most representative paradigms begin with a cold start, typically employing supervised fine-tuning (SFT), to initialize the policy before RL. However, SFT-based cold start adopts the reasoning paradigm intertwined with task solution and output format, which may induce instruction-style overfitting, weakens out-of-distribution generalization, and ultimately affects downstream RL. We revisit the cold start along two views, its training method and data construction, and introduce the Generalization Factor (GF) coefficient to quantify the generalization capability under different methods. Our empirical study finds that preference–based training methods (e.g. DPO) generalizes better than SFT-based methods in cold start. Motivated by this, we propose $\textbf{SPECS}$—a $\textbf{S}$elf-distilled, $\textbf{P}$r$\textbf{e}$ference-based $\textbf{C}$old $\textbf{S}$tart framework that decouples multimodal learning: (1) generates introspective preference data pairs via self-distillation, avoiding reliance on larger teachers or manual annotation; (2) performs preference–based training to learn, focusing on shallow, transferable surface-form criteria (format, structure, style) rather than memorizing content; and (3) hands off to RL with verifiable rewards for deep reasoning results. Experimental results across multiple multimodal benchmarks show that our decoupling learning framework yields consistent performance gains over strong baselines, improving MEGA-Bench by 4.1\% and MathVista by 12.2\%. Additional experiments indicate that SPECS contributes to reducing in-distribution “stuckness,” improving exploration, stabilizing training, and raising the performance ceiling.

TL;DR: Our Self-distilled Preference-based Cold Start (SPECS) method better prepares Vision Language Models for reinforcement learning, significantly boosting their reasoning performance.