Balanced Thinking: Improving Chain of Thought Training in Vision Language Models
Multimodal reasoning in vision-language models (VLMs) typically relies on a two-stage process: supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL). In standard SFT, all tokens contribute equally to the loss, even though reasoning data are inherently token-imbalanced. Long <think> traces overshadow short but task-critical <answer> segments, leading to verbose reasoning and inaccurate answers. We propose SCALe (Scheduled Curriculum Adaptive Loss), which explicitly separates supervision over reasoning and answer segments using dynamic, length-independent weighting. Unlike vanilla SFT, which overweights the <think> segment, SCALe-SFT gradually shifts the focus from <think> to <answer...
| Authors | Shaked Perek, Ben Wiesel, Avihu Dekel et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 19 March 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 19 March 2026 |
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