Enhancing Multimodal RLVR with Pairwise Token Contrast and Adaptive Trajectory Confidence

Abstract

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) improves multimodal reasoning, but group-relative policy optimization broadcasts a single sequence-level advantage to every token of a response, although errors usually localize to a few decisive steps. Recent self-distilled variants refine credit with a teacher--student likelihood gap. However, this signal cannot tell whether it relies on the image or on a language shortcut, and is applied uniformly even when the teacher is uninformative. To address this, we propose Pairwise token contrast and Adaptive trajectory ConfidencE (PACE). Pairwise token contrast scores each response under four teacher views, crossing a correct or incorrect answer hint with the image present or removed, and compares the two hints for every token, which cancels shifts shared by both hints and reveals whether the token's support relies on the image. Adaptive trajectory confidence measures how well the teacher predicts each response given the correct hint and the image, normalizes this score within the batch, and uses it to set how far the token contrast redistributes credit within that response. PACE achieves the best average accuracy on three backbones and ranks first on all evaluated multimodal reasoning benchmarks with Qwen3-VL-8B-Instruct. Experiments show that both components matter: replacing pairwise token contrast with a single-view signal underperforms our method, while adaptive trajectory confidence adds further improvement.