Kening Zheng
2026
GM-PRM: A Generative Multimodal Process Reward Model for Multimodal Mathematical Reasoning
Jianghangfan Zhang | Yibo Yan | Kening Zheng | Xin Zou | Song Dai | Xuming Hu
Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Advances in Language and Vision Research (ALVR)
Jianghangfan Zhang | Yibo Yan | Kening Zheng | Xin Zou | Song Dai | Xuming Hu
Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Advances in Language and Vision Research (ALVR)
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) demonstrate remarkable capabilities but often struggle with complex, multi-step mathematical reasoning, where minor errors in visual perception or logical deduction can lead to complete failure. While Process Reward Models (PRMs) offer step-by-step supervision, existing multimodal PRMs are limited to being binary verifiers that can identify but not correct errors, offering little explanatory power. To address these deficiencies, we introduce the **Generative Multimodal Process Reward Model (GM-PRM), a novel paradigm that transforms the PRM from a passive judge into an active reasoning collaborator**. Instead of a simple scalar score, GM-PRM provides a fine-grained, interpretable analysis of each reasoning step, evaluating its step intent, visual alignment, and logical soundness. More critically, GM-PRM is trained to generate a corrected version of the first erroneous step it identifies. This unique corrective capability enables our new test-time inference strategy, Refined Best-of-N (Refined-BoN). This framework actively enhances solution quality by using the PRM’s generated correction to guide the policy model toward a more promising reasoning trajectory, thereby improving the diversity and correctness of the solution pool. We demonstrate that GM-PRM achieves state-of-the-art results on multiple multimodal math benchmarks, significantly boosting policy model performance with remarkable data efficiency, requiring only a 20K-sample training dataset.
2025
SafeEraser: Enhancing Safety in Multimodal Large Language Models through Multimodal Machine Unlearning
Junkai Chen | Zhijie Deng | Kening Zheng | Yibo Yan | Shuliang Liu | PeiJun Wu | Peijie Jiang | Jia Liu | Xuming Hu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
Junkai Chen | Zhijie Deng | Kening Zheng | Yibo Yan | Shuliang Liu | PeiJun Wu | Peijie Jiang | Jia Liu | Xuming Hu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
As Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) develop, their potential security issues have become increasingly prominent. **Machine Unlearning (MU)**, as an effective strategy for forgetting specific knowledge in training data, has been widely used in privacy protection. However, *MU for safety in MLLM has yet to be fully explored*. To address this issue, we propose , a safety unlearning benchmark for MLLMs, consisting of 3,000 images and 28.8K VQA pairs. We comprehensively evaluate unlearning methods from two perspectives: **_forget quality_** and **_model utility_**. Our findings show that existing MU methods struggle to maintain model performance while implementing the forget operation and often suffer from **_over-forgetting_**. Hence, we introduce **Prompt Decouple (PD) Loss** to alleviate over-forgetting through decouple prompt during unlearning process. To quantitatively measure over-forgetting mitigated by PD Loss, we propose a new metric called **Safe Answer Refusal Rate (SARR)**. Experimental results demonstrate that combining PD Loss with existing unlearning methods can effectively prevent over-forgetting and achieve a decrease of 79.5% in the SARR metric of LLaVA-7B and LLaVA-13B, while maintaining forget quality and model utility. Our code and dataset will be released upon acceptance. **Warning: This paper contains examples of harmful language and images, and reader discretion is recommended.**
Reefknot: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Relation Hallucination Evaluation, Analysis and Mitigation in Multimodal Large Language Models
Kening Zheng | Junkai Chen | Yibo Yan | Xin Zou | Huiyu Zhou | Xuming Hu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
Kening Zheng | Junkai Chen | Yibo Yan | Xin Zou | Huiyu Zhou | Xuming Hu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
Hallucination issues continue to affect multimodal large language models (MLLMs), with existing research mainly addressing object-level or attribute-level hallucinations, neglecting the more complex relation hallucinations that require advanced reasoning. Current benchmarks for relation hallucinations lack detailed evaluation and effective mitigation, and their datasets often suffer from biases due to systematic annotation processes. To address these challenges, we introduce Reefknot, a comprehensive benchmark targeting relation hallucinations, comprising over 20,000 real-world samples. We provide a systematic definition of relation hallucinations, integrating perceptive and cognitive perspectives, and construct a relation-based corpus using the Visual Genome scene graph dataset. Our comparative evaluation reveals significant limitations in current MLLMs’ ability to handle relation hallucinations. Additionally, we propose a novel confidence-based mitigation strategy, which reduces the hallucination rate by an average of 9.75% across three datasets, including Reefknot. Our work offers valuable insights for achieving trustworthy multimodal intelligence. The dataset and code are released at https://github.com/JackChen-seu/Reefknot.