Confident First, Reflective Second: Reinforcement Learning of Confidence-Preserving Reflection for Video Understanding

Abstract

Video models answer from sampled frames and may miss the decisive moment. A common remedy is to commit to an answer, re-examine the video, and confirm or revise it, a loop now mainly learned with reinforcement learning (RL). We find that RL erodes the initial answer, a phenomenon we term confidence erosion, where confidence means the label-verified reliability of the initial answer instead of self-reported certainty: because errors can be repaired later, a correct initial answer earns less reward, and the initial answer stalls even as the final answer's gain over it rises. We propose the principle confident first, reflective second: the initial answer must stay reliable on its own, above a floor set by a reference policy, and reflection may only add to it. Our method, CoFire, implements this principle with one mechanism for each erosion channel: reward incentives, parameter drift, and gradient interference. CoFire reaches 67.0% mean accuracy on Video-MME, MLVU, and LongVideoBench, 1.7 points above the strongest compared 7B method, and improves initial-answer and final accuracy over outcome-reward RL by 4.1 and 3.7 points on average: a stronger initial answer carries through to a stronger final one.