# Unified Generation and Self-Verification for Vision-Language Models via Advantage Decoupled Preference Optimization

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.01483 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.01483/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Reinforcement learning for reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 47 of its 51 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Jan 2026.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Reinforcement learning for reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/lr/reinforcement-learning-for-reasoning/)
- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [Embodied and 3D vision-language models](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/embodied-and-3d-vision-language-models/)
- LLM alignment / RLHF / preference optimisation / [Process reward models for reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/alignment/process-reward-models-for-reasoning/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 47)

- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [Proximal Policy Optimization Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.06347/) (2017)
- [Training Verifiers to Solve Math Word Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14168/) (2021)
- [DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03300/) (2024)
- [Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arena](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05685/) (2023)
- [Self-Consistency Improves Chain of Thought Reasoning in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11171/) (2022)
- [Qwen2.5-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13923/) (2025)
- [Qwen2-VL: Enhancing Vision-Language Model's Perception of the World at Any Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12191/) (2024)
- [Let's Verify Step by Step](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.20050/) (2023)
- [Tree of Thoughts: Deliberate Problem Solving with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10601/) (2023)
- [MMMU: A Massive Multi-discipline Multimodal Understanding and Reasoning Benchmark for Expert AGI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16502/) (2023)
- [MathVista: Evaluating Mathematical Reasoning of Foundation Models in Visual Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.02255/) (2023)
- [s1: Simple test-time scaling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.19393/) (2025)
- [Modeling Context in Referring Expressions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.00272/) (2016)
- [LISA: Reasoning Segmentation via Large Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.00692/) (2023)
- [Vision-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.06749/) (2025)
- [UI-TARS: Pioneering Automated GUI Interaction with Native Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12326/) (2025)
- [ORPO: Monolithic Preference Optimization without Reference Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.07691/) (2024)
- [VLM-R1: A Stable and Generalizable R1-style Large Vision-Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.07615/) (2025)
- [Visual-RFT: Visual Reinforcement Fine-Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.01785/) (2025)
- [Generative Verifiers: Reward Modeling as Next-Token Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.15240/) (2024)
- [R1-Onevision: Advancing Generalized Multimodal Reasoning through Cross-Modal Formalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.10615/) (2025)
- [R1-VL: Learning to Reason with Multimodal Large Language Models via Step-wise Group Relative Policy Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.12937/) (2025)
- [Seg-Zero: Reasoning-Chain Guided Segmentation via Cognitive Reinforcement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.06520/) (2025)
- [On the Effects of Data Scale on UI Control Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.03679/) (2024)
- [GUIOdyssey: A Comprehensive Dataset for Cross-App GUI Navigation on Mobile Devices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08451/) (2024)
- [UI-R1: Enhancing Efficient Action Prediction of GUI Agents by Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.21620/) (2025)
- [InfiGUI-R1: Advancing Multimodal GUI Agents from Reactive Actors to Deliberative Reasoners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.14239/) (2025)
- [VisualPRM: An Effective Process Reward Model for Multimodal Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.10291/) (2025)
- [UI-Venus Technical Report: Building High-performance UI Agents with RFT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10833/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [UI-Venus-1.5 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.09082/) (2026)
- [Self-Improving World Modelling with Latent Actions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.06130/) (2026)
- [VISTA: View-Consistent Self-Verified Training for GUI Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.14579/) (2026)
- [UI-Venus-2 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.00028/) (2026)
- [ESC: Emotional Self-Correction for Reliable Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.02089/) (2026)
- [Trinity: Self-Evolving Vision-Language Models with a Self-Verifier](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.04469/) (2026)
- [When to Rethink: Learning Multi-Perspective Self-Verification for Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.07018/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Parallel test-time scaling typically trains separate generation and verification models, incurring high training and inference costs. We propose Advantage Decoupled Preference Optimization (ADPO), a unified reinforcement learning framework that jointly learns answer generation and self-verification within a single policy. ADPO introduces two innovations: a preference verification reward improving verification capability and a decoupled optimization mechanism enabling synergistic optimization of generation and verification. Specifically, the preference verification reward computes mean verification scores from positive and negative samples as decision thresholds, providing positive feedback when prediction correctness aligns with answer correctness. Meanwhile, the advantage decoupled optimization computes separate advantages for generation and verification, applies token masks to isolate gradients, and combines masked GRPO objectives, preserving generation quality while calibrating verification scores. ADPO achieves up to +34.1% higher verification AUC and -53.5% lower inference time, with significant gains of +2.8%/+1.4% accuracy on MathVista/MMMU, +1.9 cIoU on ReasonSeg, and +1.7%/+1.0% step success rate on AndroidControl/GUI Odyssey.