Learning What Matters: Dynamic Dimension Selection and Aggregation for Interpretable Vision-Language Reward Modeling
About
Vision-language reward modeling faces a dilemma: generative approaches are interpretable but slow, while discriminative ones are efficient but act as opaque "black boxes." To bridge this gap, we propose VL-MDR (Vision-Language Multi-Dimensional Reward), a framework that dynamically decomposes evaluation into granular, interpretable dimensions. Instead of outputting a monolithic scalar, VL-MDR employs a visual-aware gating mechanism to identify relevant dimensions and adaptively weight them (e.g., Hallucination, Reasoning) for each specific input. To support this, we curate a dataset of 321k vision-language preference pairs annotated across 21 fine-grained dimensions. Extensive experiments show that VL-MDR consistently outperforms existing open-source reward models on benchmarks like VL-RewardBench. Furthermore, we show that VL-MDR-constructed preference pairs effectively enable DPO alignment to mitigate visual hallucinations and improve reliability, providing a scalable solution for VLM alignment.
Related benchmarks
| Task | Dataset | Result | Rank | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Multimodal Reward Modeling | VL-RewardBench | Accuracy73.06 | 76 | |
| Hallucination Evaluation | MMHal | Score4.2 | 37 | |
| Multimodal Reward Modeling | RewardBench Multimodal | Safety Score51.2 | 31 | |
| Real-world Understanding | WildVision | Win Rate68.3 | 25 | |
| Image Understanding | LLaVABenchWilder | Score77.9 | 8 | |
| Image Understanding | LLaVABench | Score101.9 | 8 |