Not All Prompts Are Equal: Exploration-Guided Prompt Scaffolding for Multimodal Reinforcement Post-Training
Exploration-guided prompt scaffolding rewrites training prompts by Exploration Potential Score, boosting multimodal RL post-training accuracy up to 11.5%.
The paper proposes dynamically adapting the training prompt distribution during online RL post-training of multimodal LLMs using the Exploration Potential Score (EPS), a lightweight rollout-based proxy for prompt utility computed from on-policy statistics with no additional overhead. Rather than discarding low-utility prompts, a teacher model generates scaffolded rewrites that preserve task intent while making training more informative. Integrated with GRPO on Geo3K and MMK12, the method achieves up to 9.7% relative in-domain improvement plus 11.5% on MathVision and 11.1% on MMMU-Pro.