Large multimodal models (LMMs) are commonly post-trained through supervised fine-tuning (SFT) followed by reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR). However, SFT may introduce distributional drift, where the post-SFT policy neither fully preserves the original model capabilities nor faithfully matches the supervision distribution. This issue is particularly challenging for multimodal reasoning, where visual perception and logical reasoning errors can drift in different ways and further affect downstream RL.
For detailed instructions on inference, training, and evaluation, please refer to our
GitHub repository. We recommend using the scripts and environment provided there to reproduce our results.
If you find PRISM useful for your research and applications, please cite using this BibTeX:
1@misc{wang2026sfttorlprealignmentblackboxonpolicy,
2 title={Beyond SFT-to-RL: Pre-alignment via Black-Box On-Policy Distillation for Multimodal RL},
3 author={Sudong Wang and Weiquan Huang and Xiaomin Yu and Zuhao Yang and Hehai Lin and Keming Wu and Chaojun Xiao and Chen Chen and Wenxuan Wang and Beier Zhu and Yunjian Zhang and Chengwei Qin},
4 year={2026},
5 eprint={2604.28123},
6 archivePrefix={arXiv},
7 primaryClass={cs.CV},
8 url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.28123},
9}
We gratefully acknowledge the following open-source projects that made this work possible:
We thank the developers and contributors of these projects for their excellent work and for making their code publicly available.