@inproceedings{huang-etal-2026-drift,
title = "{DRIFT}: Transferring Reasoning Priors for Efficient {MLLM} Fine-Tuning",
author = "Huang, Chao and
Zhang, Zeliang and
Liu, Jiang and
Sun, Ximeng and
Wu, Jialian and
Yu, Xiaodong and
Wang, Ze and
Xu, Chenliang and
Barsoum, Emad and
Liu, Zicheng",
editor = "Liakata, Maria and
Moreira, Viviane P. and
Zhang, Jiajun and
Jurgens, David",
booktitle = "Findings of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics: {ACL} 2026",
month = jul,
year = "2026",
address = "San Diego, California, United States",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-acl.1015/",
pages = "20294--20309",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-395-1",
abstract = "Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have made rapid progress, yet their reasoning ability often lags behind strong text-only LLMs. Bridging this gap typically requires large-scale multimodal reasoning data or reinforcement learning, incurring substantial cost. An appealing alternative is parameter-space model merging between reasoning-enhanced LLMs and MLLMs, but we show that naive merging is fragile: its effectiveness varies widely across model families and can significantly degrade performance (e.g., for Qwen-based MLLMs). We propose Directional Reasoning Injection for Fine-Tuning (DRIFT), a lightweight method that transfers reasoning knowledge in the gradient space while preserving multimodal alignment. DRIFT precomputes a reasoning prior from the parameter differences between text-only reasoning experts and multimodal models, and uses it to bias gradients during supervised fine-tuning. This design retains the simplicity of standard SFT pipelines while enabling efficient and stable reasoning transfer. Experiments on multimodal reasoning benchmarks, including MathVista and MathVerse, show that DRIFT consistently outperforms naive merging and standard SFT, and matches or surpasses training-intensive methods with substantially lower data and compute."
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<abstract>Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have made rapid progress, yet their reasoning ability often lags behind strong text-only LLMs. Bridging this gap typically requires large-scale multimodal reasoning data or reinforcement learning, incurring substantial cost. An appealing alternative is parameter-space model merging between reasoning-enhanced LLMs and MLLMs, but we show that naive merging is fragile: its effectiveness varies widely across model families and can significantly degrade performance (e.g., for Qwen-based MLLMs). We propose Directional Reasoning Injection for Fine-Tuning (DRIFT), a lightweight method that transfers reasoning knowledge in the gradient space while preserving multimodal alignment. DRIFT precomputes a reasoning prior from the parameter differences between text-only reasoning experts and multimodal models, and uses it to bias gradients during supervised fine-tuning. This design retains the simplicity of standard SFT pipelines while enabling efficient and stable reasoning transfer. Experiments on multimodal reasoning benchmarks, including MathVista and MathVerse, show that DRIFT consistently outperforms naive merging and standard SFT, and matches or surpasses training-intensive methods with substantially lower data and compute.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T DRIFT: Transferring Reasoning Priors for Efficient MLLM Fine-Tuning
%A Huang, Chao
%A Zhang, Zeliang
%A Liu, Jiang
%A Sun, Ximeng
%A Wu, Jialian
%A Yu, Xiaodong
%A Wang, Ze
%A Xu, Chenliang
%A Barsoum, Emad
%A Liu, Zicheng
%Y Liakata, Maria
%Y Moreira, Viviane P.
%Y Zhang, Jiajun
%Y Jurgens, David
%S Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
%D 2026
%8 July
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C San Diego, California, United States
%@ 979-8-89176-395-1
%F huang-etal-2026-drift
%X Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have made rapid progress, yet their reasoning ability often lags behind strong text-only LLMs. Bridging this gap typically requires large-scale multimodal reasoning data or reinforcement learning, incurring substantial cost. An appealing alternative is parameter-space model merging between reasoning-enhanced LLMs and MLLMs, but we show that naive merging is fragile: its effectiveness varies widely across model families and can significantly degrade performance (e.g., for Qwen-based MLLMs). We propose Directional Reasoning Injection for Fine-Tuning (DRIFT), a lightweight method that transfers reasoning knowledge in the gradient space while preserving multimodal alignment. DRIFT precomputes a reasoning prior from the parameter differences between text-only reasoning experts and multimodal models, and uses it to bias gradients during supervised fine-tuning. This design retains the simplicity of standard SFT pipelines while enabling efficient and stable reasoning transfer. Experiments on multimodal reasoning benchmarks, including MathVista and MathVerse, show that DRIFT consistently outperforms naive merging and standard SFT, and matches or surpasses training-intensive methods with substantially lower data and compute.
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-acl.1015/
%P 20294-20309
Markdown (Informal)
[DRIFT: Transferring Reasoning Priors for Efficient MLLM Fine-Tuning](https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-acl.1015/) (Huang et al., Findings 2026)
ACL
- Chao Huang, Zeliang Zhang, Jiang Liu, Ximeng Sun, Jialian Wu, Xiaodong Yu, Ze Wang, Chenliang Xu, Emad Barsoum, and Zicheng Liu. 2026. DRIFT: Transferring Reasoning Priors for Efficient MLLM Fine-Tuning. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026, pages 20294–20309, San Diego, California, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.