FRISM: Fine-Grained Reasoning Injection via Subspace-Level Model Merging for Vision-Language Models

Abstract: Efficiently enhancing the reasoning capabilities of Vision-LLMs (VLMs) by merging them with Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) has emerged as a promising direction. However, existing methods typically operate at a coarse-grained layer level, which often leads to a trade-off between injecting reasoning capabilities and preserving visual capabilities. To address this limitation, we propose {FRISM} (Fine-grained Reasoning Injection via Subspace-level model Merging), a fine-grained reasoning injection framework based on subspace-level model merging. Observing that reasoning capabilities are encoded in distinct subspaces, FRISM decomposes LRM task vectors via Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) and adaptively tunes the scaling coefficients of each subspace through learning to realize fine-grained reasoning injection. Furthermore, we introduce a label-free self-distillation learning strategy with a dual-objective optimization using common vision-language perception datasets. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FRISM effectively improves reasoning capabilities without compromising the model's original visual capabilities by consistently achieving state-of-the-art performance across diverse visual reasoning benchmarks.