# Where-OPD: Spatially Guided On-Policy Self-Distillation of MLLMs with Synthetic Scenes

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.02117 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.02117/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Multimodal distillation, one of 12 directions in Knowledge distillation.
- Builds on 41 of its 45 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Oct 2026.

## Placed in

- Knowledge distillation / [Multimodal distillation](https://mlsanity.com/distill/multimodal-distillation/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 41)

- [DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03300/) (2024)
- [Improved Baselines with Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03744/) (2023)
- [Qwen3-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.21631/) (2025)
- [ChartQA: A Benchmark for Question Answering about Charts with Visual and Logical Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10244/) (2022)
- [CLEVR: A Diagnostic Dataset for Compositional Language and Elementary Visual Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.06890/) (2016)
- [DocVQA: A Dataset for VQA on Document Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.00398/) (2020)
- [ShareGPT4V: Improving Large Multi-Modal Models with Better Captions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12793/) (2023)
- [On-Policy Distillation of Language Models: Learning from Self-Generated Mistakes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.13649/) (2023)
- [Shikra: Unleashing Multimodal LLM's Referential Dialogue Magic](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.15195/) (2023)
- [Cambrian-1: A Fully Open, Vision-Centric Exploration of Multimodal LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.16860/) (2024)
- [Vision-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.06749/) (2025)
- [HallusionBench: An Advanced Diagnostic Suite for Entangled Language Hallucination and Visual Illusion in Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.14566/) (2023)
- [BLINK: Multimodal Large Language Models Can See but Not Perceive](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.12390/) (2024)
- [Visual-RFT: Visual Reinforcement Fine-Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.01785/) (2025)
- [V*: Guided Visual Search as a Core Mechanism in Multimodal LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14135/) (2023)
- [OCRBench: On the Hidden Mystery of OCR in Large Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.07895/) (2023)
- [Self-Distilled Reasoner: On-Policy Self-Distillation for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.18734/) (2026)
- [AMBER: An LLM-free Multi-dimensional Benchmark for MLLMs Hallucination Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.07397/) (2023)
- [MME-RealWorld: Could Your Multimodal LLM Challenge High-Resolution Real-World Scenarios that are Difficult for Humans?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.13257/) (2024)
- [Honeybee: Locality-enhanced Projector for Multimodal LLM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.06742/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Eagle: Exploring The Design Space for Multimodal LLMs with Mixture of Encoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.15998/) (2024)
- [Perception-R1: Pioneering Perception Policy with Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.07954/) (2025)
- [LION : Empowering Multimodal Large Language Model with Dual-Level Visual Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.11860/) (2023)
- [Vision-OPD: Learning to See Fine Details for Multimodal LLMs via On-Policy Self-Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.18740/) (2026)
- [BRAVE: Broadening the visual encoding of vision-language models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.07204/) (2024)
- [Reconstructive Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.09575/) (2024)
- [Zooming without Zooming: Region-to-Image Distillation for Fine-Grained Multimodal Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.11858/) (2026)
- [Visual Representation Alignment for Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.07979/) (2025)
- [Jigsaw-R1: A Study of Rule-based Visual Reinforcement Learning with Jigsaw Puzzles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.23590/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

On-policy self-distillation has recently emerged as an effective approach for improving language-model reasoning by supervising students with a frozen or EMA version of themselves that receives privileged information. Its application to multimodal large language models (MLLMs), however, remains largely unexplored. Recent approaches use privileged visual information, such as image crops corresponding to a question, to improve fine-grained perception, but their gains are confined to tasks that benefit from such visual zooming and require either human-annotated grounding data or external teacher models. We introduce a different form of on-policy self-distillation for MLLMs that provides the teacher with textual, spatially grounded guidance identifying the visual elements relevant to a query. We use procedurally generated scenes with automatically available object identities and spatial coordinates, enabling scalable and annotation-free post-training. The teacher uses this spatial guidance to locate and integrate evidence from multiple relevant image regions, while the student learns to reproduce the resulting behavior from the image and question alone. Our approach consistently improves performance on counting, document and chart understanding benchmarks across multiple models. Importantly, although post-training uses only synthetic scenes, the resulting improvements transfer to real-world perception benchmarks, yielding a 3.23-point gain in average performance across CVBench, V*, ZoomBench, BLINK, HR-Bench, and MME-RealWorld. These results show that spatially grounded privileged information can induce broader perceptual capabilities through on-policy self-distillation, enabling substantial synthetic-to-real transfer beyond the task and data distribution used for post-training. Project page: https://github.com/sirkosophia/Where-OPD