Jun 17, 2026 · cs.CVJ/K move · Enter open · S save
Pengyu Li, Zhitao Gao, Lingling Zhang, Muye Huang+4
1Xi’an Jiaotong University · 3Shaanxi Province Key Laboratory of Big Data Knowledge Engineering · 2MOE KLINNS Lab, Xi’an Jiaotong University · 4Sun Yat-sen University.
Unified multimodal models (UMMs) interleave generated ''visual thoughts'' (VTs) with text reasoning to improve spatial tasks. This incurs roughly an order-of-magnitude inference cost from multi-step diffusion. We find this cost yields limited direct benefit. On ThinkMorph, removing or noising VTs barely changes accuracy across nine benchmarks. Once rendered, attention concentrates on the VT regardless of content. Yet a KL diagnostic shows that conditioning on a privileged VT trace shifts the model's completion distribution. This suggests the generation pathway encodes useful reasoning beyond the rendered pixels. Motivated by this gap, we propose Visual On-Policy Self-Distillation(Visual-OPSD). Teacher and student share identical weights but differ in context: the teacher sees privileged VTs while the student sees only the question. Token-level JSD distillation on on-policy student trajectories transfers the teacher's reasoning to a text-only student. Across nine benchmarks, Visual-OPSD improves over its generative teacher by
+3.40pp with
14.3× speedup (10.0s vs. 142.8s per sample) and outperforms same-scale VLMs by
+63.83pp on VSP. A Gaussian-noise control (
+0.40pp vs.
+10.28pp for real VTs) and
58.4% closure of the KL gap confirm that gains come from the semantic content of the generation pathway.