J. Q. Zhang

Jusheng Zhang, Yijia Fan, Wenjun Lin et al.

We propose GAM-Agent, a game-theoretic multi-agent framework for enhancing vision-language reasoning. Unlike prior single-agent or monolithic models, GAM-Agent formulates the reasoning process as a non-zero-sum game between base agents--each specializing in visual perception subtasks--and a critical agent that verifies logic consistency and factual correctness. Agents communicate via structured claims, evidence, and uncertainty estimates. The framework introduces an uncertainty-aware controller to dynamically adjust agent collaboration, triggering multi-round debates when disagreement or ambiguity is detected. This process yields more robust and interpretable predictions. Experiments on four challenging benchmarks--MMMU, MMBench, MVBench, and V*Bench--demonstrate that GAM-Agent significantly improves performance across various VLM backbones. Notably, GAM-Agent boosts the accuracy of small-to-mid scale models (e.g., Qwen2.5-VL-7B, InternVL3-14B) by 5--6\%, and still enhances strong models like GPT-4o by up to 2--3\%. Our approach is modular, scalable, and generalizable, offering a path toward reliable and explainable multi-agent multimodal reasoning.

Jusheng Zhang, Kaitong Cai, Jing Yang et al.

Preference-based finetuning of vision--language models (VLMs) is brittle: trivially wrong negatives inject uninformative gradients that destabilize training. We recast alignment as \textbf{learning-dynamics--aware optimization} and introduce \textbf{Cooling-Weighted DPO (CW-DPO)}, a two-stage recipe that explicitly models and exploits the training trajectory. \textbf{Stage 1} performs supervised finetuning with \textbf{gentle negatives}: \textbf{low-weight smoothed supervision} that regularizes the base policy and curbs overconfidence without explicit penalties. \textbf{Stage 2} applies a DPO objective in which the \textbf{negative term is scaled by a cooling weight} computed from the model's \textbf{average token log-probability} on each negative, suppressing uninformative gradients from easy or off-distribution samples while preserving signal from hard negatives. In practice, we emphasize \textbf{on-policy negatives} and allow \textbf{mixed negatives} by blending a controllable fraction of dataset negatives to maintain contrast freshness. Throughout, we instrument training with $Δ\!\log p$ probes on positives and negatives as first-class signals for early stopping, curriculum design, and failure diagnosis. Across diverse VLM tasks, CW-DPO yields \textbf{more stable optimization}, \textbf{better calibration}, and \textbf{higher pairwise win-rates} than SFT-only and vanilla DPO, while \textbf{converging in fewer steps}. Ablations isolate the \textbf{cooling-weight mechanism} as the primary driver of these gains and show complementary benefits from mixing on-policy and dataset negatives. Taken together, our results show that \textbf{smoothing learning dynamics before cooling preferences} is a simple, general principle for robust VLM alignment.