Method
RLVR rewards typically check only the final answer, not whether it came from the image or from language priors and dataset shortcuts. EVAN masks the visual evidence a question needs, lets the current policy answer without it, and penalizes plausible wrong answers under the clean image. EVAN-7B is trained with DAPO on ViRL39K. The GitHub repository has the full method, data pipeline, and training scripts.
Results
Accuracy (%) from Table 1 of the paper, with sampling at temperature 1.0. DAPO uses the same data and training recipe without EVAN.
Table with columns: Model, Geo3K, MathVista, MathVerse, We-Math, DynaMath, MathVision, MMK12, MMMU-Pro, LogicVista, Avg.| Model | Geo3K | MathVista | MathVerse | We-Math | DynaMath | MathVision | MMK12 | MMMU-Pro | LogicVista | Avg. |
|---|
| Qwen2.5-VL-7B-Instruct | 36.1 | 63.9 | 38.6 | 46.6 | 56.1 | 18.6 | 43.4 | 25.9 | 42.8 | 41.3 |
| DAPO | 45.5 | 66.2 | 69.2 | 68.4 | 65.8 | 29.0 | 81.9 | 37.0 | 45.8 | 56.5 |
| EVAN-7B | 46.0 | 69.0 | 69.1 | 69.7 | 66.5 | 31.3 | 82.2 | 38.8 | 48.8 | 57.9 |
Usage
Requires transformers>=4.57, accelerate, and torchvision. Add the instruction below after the question, as in training. The default generation config holds the sampling settings we used for evaluation.
from transformers import AutoModelForImageTextToText, AutoProcessor model_id = "DawnLiu/EVAN-7B"model = AutoModelForImageTextToText.from_pretrained(model_id, dtype="auto", device_map="auto")processor = AutoProcessor.from_pretrained(model_id) question = "Which object is the largest?"prompt = ( f"{question}\n\n" "You first think through the reasoning process as an internal monologue, enclosed within <think> </think> tags. Then, provide your final answer enclosed within \\boxed{}.")messages = [ { "role": "user", "content": [ {"type": "image", "image": "path/to/image.png"}, {"type": "text", "text": prompt}, ], }]inputs = processor.apply_chat_template( messages, tokenize=True, add_generation_prompt=True, return_dict=True, return_tensors="pt").to(model.device)output = model.generate(**inputs)print(processor.decode(output[0, inputs["input_ids"].shape[1]:], skip_special_tokens=True))
Citation
@misc{liu2026grounding, title = {Grounding Multimodal Reasoning with Evidence-Ablated Negatives}, author = {Chenxi Liu and Tianyi Xiong and Yanshuo Chen and Heng Huang}, year = {2026}, eprint = {2610.39237}, archivePrefix = {arXiv}, url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.39237},}
License
Apache 2.0, the same as Qwen2.5-VL-7B-Instruct. Relative to the base model, the weights were changed by RL training with EVAN, generation_config.json sets our evaluation sampling defaults, and the other configuration, tokenizer, and processor files were re-saved (with dtype set to bfloat16 in config.json).