Visual Jigsaw Post-Training Improves MLLMs

ICLR 2026 Conference Submission840 Authors

Keywords: Multimodal Large Language Models, Self-supervised Learning, Post-training, Reinforcement Learning, Visual Jigsaw

Abstract: Reinforcement learning based post-training has recently emerged as a powerful paradigm for enhancing the alignment and reasoning capabilities of multimodal large language models (MLLMs). While *vision-centric* post-training is crucial for enhancing MLLMs’ intrinsic understanding of visual signals, current post-training paradigms are predominantly *text-centric*, where dense visual inputs are only leveraged to extract sparse cues for text-based reasoning. There exist a few approaches in this direction, however, they often still rely on text as an intermediate mediator or introduce additional visual generative designs. In this work, we introduce **Visual Jigsaw**, a generic *self-supervised* post-training framework designed to strengthen visual understanding in MLLMs. Visual Jigsaw is formulated as a general ordering task: visual inputs are partitioned, shuffled, and the model must reconstruct the visual information by producing the correct permutation in natural language. This naturally aligns with reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards (RLVR), requires no additional visual generative components, and derives its supervisory signal automatically without any annotations. We instantiate Visual Jigsaw across three visual modalities, including images, videos, and 3D data. Extensive experiments demonstrate substantial improvements in fine-grained perception, temporal reasoning, and 3D spatial understanding. Our findings highlight the potential of self-supervised vision-centric tasks in post-training MLLMs and aim to inspire further research on vision-centric pretext designs.

Primary Area: foundation or frontier models, including LLMs

Submission Number: 840