arXiv AI

Anchoring What Matters: A Dual-Level Learning Framework for Visually-Grounded Multimodal Reasoning

The paper introduces PIVOT, a dual-level learning framework designed to improve visually-grounded multimodal reasoning in large vision-language models. PIVOT employs a self‑calibrated experience replay mechanism to selectively reuse valuable visual reasoning trajectories, and a vision‑guided advantage allocation scheme that assigns extra rewards to tokens with strong visual support. Experiments on multiple benchmarks show that PIVOT enhances the multimodal reasoning performance of these models.

arXiv Computation and Language
6d ago

GRIT: Gradient Masking for Visually Misgrounded Tokens in Text-Rich Reasoning

The paper introduces GRIT, a training framework that adds visual grounding to reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) for vision-language models, addressing the issue of Correct-but-Visually-Misgrounded Reasoning (CVMR). CVMR occurs when models produce correct final answers while misperceiving visual information during intermediate reasoning steps, a problem that standard RLVR rewards cannot detect. By analyzing token-level attention patterns, the authors show that CVMR tokens differ from well-grounded tokens and use this insight to guide GRIT, which improves both reasoning accuracy and grounding fidelity. Additionally, the authors present GRIT-Bench, a new benchmark for evaluating text-rich reasoning across varying text lengths and reasoning depths.

By Chanseul Cho, Noori Bae, Dongheon Lee, Youngmin Ro
arXiv AI
Aug 11

Multi-Branch Policy Optimization for Multimodal Large Language Models

arXiv:2608. 07581v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Group-based reinforcement learning methods for multimodal large language models typically rely on trajectory-level credit assignment that applies a single advantage to all tokens in a response.

By Shuai Lyu, Yuning Gong, Ruiling Gao, Xiaoran Shang, Zhonghong Ou, Ping Zong, Yifan Zhu, Yuan Sun, Yang Qin, Peng Hu
arXiv AI
Oct 28

VideoLVR: Latent Visual Reasoning over Grounded Video Evidence

VideoLVR introduces a method for multimodal large language models to maintain visual grounding during chain-of-thought reasoning by constructing latent visual evidence from local video regions at relevant moments. It uses a visual token prediction objective that unifies visual evidence reconstruction and text generation, allowing models to interleave text tokens with latent visual states. The approach is further extended with reinforcement learning, treating visual tokens as actions and optimizing policies with final-answer rewards, thereby improving video understanding without expanding the multimodal context.

By Shilong Li, Xingyuan Bu, Hao Shi, Yun Xing, Weixin Feng, Qiangpeng Yang, Shilei Wen
arXiv AI
Aug 25

VisionCoach: Reinforcing Grounded Video Reasoning via Visual-Perception Prompting

VisionCoach is an input‑adaptive reinforcement learning framework that enhances spatio‑temporal grounding in video reasoning by using visual prompting during training. The system selectively applies visual prompts to challenging inputs, amplifying question‑relevant evidence and suppressing distractors, and then internalizes these improvements through self‑distillation so that inference can be performed on raw videos without prompts. Experiments on multiple benchmarks (V‑STAR, VideoMME, World‑Sense, VideoMMMU, PerceptionTest, and Charades‑STA) show that VisionCoach achieves state‑of‑the‑art performance while maintaining a single efficient inference pathway.

By Daeun Lee, Shoubin Yu, Yue Zhang, Mohit Bansal
arXiv AI
Jun 3

Entropy Is Not Enough: Unlocking Effective Reinforcement Learning for Visual Reasoning via Vision-Anchored Token Selection

arXiv:2606. 03937v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: While token-level entropy is commonly recognized as effective for credit assignment in text-only reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR), it remains unclear whether this mechanism still holds in visual reasoning.

By Senjie Jin, Peixin Wang, Boyang Liu, Xiaoran Fan, Shuo Li, Zhiheng Xi, Jiazheng Zhang, Yuhao Zhou, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
arXiv AI
Aug 5

CURV: Enhancing Chart Understanding Through Curriculum Visual Grounded Reasoning

arXiv:2608. 02833v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Chart question answering (CQA) requires multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to integrate visual comprehension with logical reasoning, yet current models struggle with accurate visual grounding and coherent reasoning chains.

By Xuehang Guo, Pingyue Zhang, Ruiyi Zhang, Zhenhailong Wang, Hanrui Lyu, Heng Ji, Tong Sun, Qingyun Wang, Manling Li