# BAS-OPD: Budget-Aware Selective On-Policy Self-Distillation for Fine-Grained Multimodal Perception

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.25891 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.25891/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in MLLM training and visual instruction tuning, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models.
- Builds on 19 of its 20 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Sep 2026.

## Placed in

- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [MLLM training and visual instruction tuning](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/mllm-training-and-visual-instruction-tuning/)
- Knowledge distillation / [Multimodal distillation](https://mlsanity.com/distill/multimodal-distillation/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03300/) (2024)
- [Qwen2-VL: Enhancing Vision-Language Model's Perception of the World at Any Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12191/) (2024)
- [DAPO: An Open-Source LLM Reinforcement Learning System at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.14476/) (2025)
- [Evaluating Object Hallucination in Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10355/) (2023)
- [How Far Are We to GPT-4V? Closing the Gap to Commercial Multimodal Models with Open-Source Suites](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16821/) (2024)
- [On-Policy Distillation of Language Models: Learning from Self-Generated Mistakes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.13649/) (2023)
- [Are We on the Right Way for Evaluating Large Vision-Language Models?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.20330/) (2024)
- [Cambrian-1: A Fully Open, Vision-Centric Exploration of Multimodal LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.16860/) (2024)
- [Eyes Wide Shut? Exploring the Visual Shortcomings of Multimodal LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.06209/) (2024)
- [V*: Guided Visual Search as a Core Mechanism in Multimodal LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14135/) (2023)
- [Self-Distilled Reasoner: On-Policy Self-Distillation for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.18734/) (2026)
- [Rethinking On-Policy Distillation of Large Language Models: Phenomenology, Mechanism, and Recipe](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.13016/) (2026)
- [Self-Distillation Enables Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.19897/) (2026)
- [LLaVA-UHD: an LMM Perceiving Any Aspect Ratio and High-Resolution Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11703/) (2024)
- [DistiLLM: Towards Streamlined Distillation for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03898/) (2024)
- [Divide, Conquer and Combine: A Training-Free Framework for High-Resolution Image Perception in Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.15556/) (2024)
- [Vision-OPD: Learning to See Fine Details for Multimodal LLMs via On-Policy Self-Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.18740/) (2026)
- [Zooming without Zooming: Region-to-Image Distillation for Fine-Grained Multimodal Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.11858/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) often struggle with fine-grained visual perception when processing complete images, as critical evidence may only appear in local regions. On-policy self-distillation (OPD) enables transferring privileged visual knowledge from informative views to full-image policies, but querying the teacher for every rollout introduces substantial supervision costs. In this work, we propose BAS-OPD, a budget-aware selective OPD framework that allocates teacher supervision under limited query budgets. Instead of querying all rollouts, BAS-OPD selects informative samples while maintaining full-batch student generation. We explore random, uncertainty-based, and learned utility-based selection strategies, where the learned selector estimates query value from detached rollout statistics and online utility signals derived from student--teacher agreement and teacher confidence without additional student forward passes. BAS-OPD only changes training-time supervision allocation and preserves single-pass full-image inference. Experiments on fine-grained multimodal perception benchmarks demonstrate that BAS-OPD achieves strong performance while substantially reducing teacher supervision costs, highlighting the effectiveness of selective OPD under constrained budgets.