MIRA: Reinforcing Multimodal Reasoning via Deceptive Contextual Augmentation

While Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has significantly advanced multimodal reasoning, existing frameworks suffer from a critical "perception-reasoning gap." Due to an over-reliance on seemingly relevant visual tokens, even minor perceptual perturbations can propagate through the reasoning process, leading to compounding hallucinations. To address this issue, we propose MIRA, a training framework that improves robustness to erroneous visual contexts while enhancing logical reasoning ability. By injecting filtered, deceptive visual contexts during training, we construct challenging "hard traps" that stress-test the model's robustness to misleading information. Furthermore, we introduce a group-wise reflection-triggering mechanism that enables the model to autonomously detect and rectify inconsistencies between visual cues and logical constraints, which is ultimately internalized as an intrinsic policy behavior. Importantly, MIRA does not rely on human annotations. Experimental results across multiple reasoning and perception benchmarks show that MIRA yields an average 7% improvement on in-domain benchmarks, with consistent improvements on vision-centric benchmarks. These findings highlight that active error recovery is essential for robust multimodal reasoning. Comprehensive ablation studies and analyses further provide insights into why MIRA is effective.

Authors

Publication Details

Journal
arXiv (Cornell University)
Published
2026-11-02
DOI
https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2611.03087
Primary Topic
Multimodal Machine Learning Applications
Type
preprint
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preprint

MIRA: Reinforcing Multimodal Reasoning via Deceptive Contextual Augmentation

Chunguang Qie, Yifeng Yao, Zhihan Yin, and Bingyue Peng et al.
arXiv (Cornell University)
Multimodal Machine Learning Applications
preprint

MIRA: Reinforcing Multimodal Reasoning via Deceptive Contextual Augmentation

Chunguang Qie, Yifeng Yao, Zhihan Yin, and Bingyue Peng, Jianxin Liang, Nonghai Zhang, Dongyan Zhao, Huishuai Zhang
preprint en

Abstract

While Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has significantly advanced multimodal reasoning, existing frameworks suffer from a critical "perception-reasoning gap." Due to an over-reliance on seemingly relevant visual tokens, even minor perceptual perturbations can propagate through the reasoning process, leading to compounding hallucinations. To address this issue, we propose MIRA, a training framework that improves robustness to erroneous visual contexts while enhancing logical reasoning ability. By injecting filtered, deceptive visual contexts during training, we construct challenging "hard traps" that stress-test the model's robustness to misleading information. Furthermore, we introduce a group-wise reflection-triggering mechanism that enables the model to autonomously detect and rectify inconsistencies between visual cues and logical constraints, which is ultimately internalized as an intrinsic policy behavior. Importantly, MIRA does not rely on human annotations. Experimental results across multiple reasoning and perception benchmarks show that MIRA yields an average 7% improvement on in-domain benchmarks, with consistent improvements on vision-centric benchmarks. These findings highlight that active error recovery is essential for robust multimodal reasoning. Comprehensive ablation studies and analyses further provide insights into why MIRA is effective.

arXiv (Cornell University)
Multimodal Machine Learning Applications
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