arXiv Computation and Language

Momentum-Coupled Rubric Adaptation for Detailed Image Captioning

arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 2

A Glance Is All You Need: Single-Pass Fine-Grained Image Captioning with SimLoss

arXiv:2609.00591v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: An image may be worth a thousand words, but most captioning models describe it in only a few. Modern vision-language models produce fluent high-level c...

By Suryaansh Jain, Rahasya Barkur, Vishal G, Ryan Rossi, Franck Dernoncourt, Jack Wang, Koustava Goswami, Nedim Lipka, Puneet Mathur, Samyadeep Basu, Seunghyun Yoon
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 27

V-Rubrics: Visual Faithfulness via Rubric-Based Reinforcement Learning

The paper introduces V‑Rubrics, a reinforcement‑learning framework that evaluates vision‑language model responses by breaking them into atomic propositions and scoring them on Visual Faithfulness, Reasoning Consistency, and Instruction Following. Using a fine‑tuned Qwen3‑VL‑8B‑Instruct model and a newly created 50K‑example V‑Rubrics dataset, the authors demonstrate that rubric‑based GRPO outperforms both a shared SFT baseline and an answer‑only GRPO, especially on knowledge‑oriented and visually grounded reasoning tasks.

By Shulin Tian, Minglun Li, Yuhao Dong, Hao Ding, Jiarui Yao, Haiwen Diao, Jingkang Yang, Hongyuan Zhu, Ziwei Liu
arXiv AI
Aug 24

Re$^3$Cap: Retrieval-Guided Refinement for Image Captioning Enhancement via Reinforcement Learning

Re$^3$Cap introduces a retrieval‑guided refinement strategy for image captioning that leverages multi‑modal retrieval as a reasoning signal. The method, built on a Caption Refinement Suggester and a Caption Quality Assessor, detects hallucinations and omissions to produce more accurate and detailed captions without extra annotations. Experiments show it surpasses supervised fine‑tuning and improves relation reasoning by 8.64% on the COCO‑LN500 benchmark.

By Haonan Jia, Shichao Dong, Zenghui Sun, Jiawen Zheng, Ziqi Miao, Gege Shi, Qiuyu Zhao, Jinsong Lan, Xiaoyong Zhu, Bo Zheng
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 6

Claim-Level Rubric Rewards for Video Caption Reinforcement Learning

In this paper, we introduce Claim-Level Rubric Rewards (CuRe), a structured reward framework designed to address the reward-design bottleneck in reinforcement learning for dense video captioning. Existing reward designs generally fall into two categories: holistic response-level judgment across heterogeneous criteria, or alignment-based evaluation against reference captions.

arXiv AI
Aug 3

Adjudicated Captioning: Multi-Agent Alignment Scoring and Consensus-Distilled Beam Arbitration for Strict Zero-Shot Image Captioning

arXiv:2607. 28986v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Zero-shot image captioning (ZIC) describes images without paired image-caption supervision during captioner training, relying on text-only corpora and frozen pretrained image-text scorers.

By Duy Tran Thanh, Thien-Phuc Doan, Long Nguyen-Vu, Ngo Tan Vu Khanh
arXiv AI
3d ago

Stepwise Intrinsic Rewards for Reasoning in Large Language Models

The paper introduces Stepwise Marginal Information Gain (MIG), an intrinsic process reward that evaluates how each reasoning step of a large language model (LLM) or vision-language model (VLM) improves the likelihood of the reference answer. MIG rewards only new likelihood maxima, preventing duplicate credit, and is combined with outcome, format, and self‑distillation objectives to guide training. Experiments on eight benchmarks show that this method outperforms outcome‑only reinforcement learning and improves accuracy by up to 4.8 points over binary‑reward training, including a 12.6‑point gain on MathVerse and a 12.9‑point advantage on vision‑language transfer at 7B parameters.

By Xiangwei Wang, Wei Wang, Ken Chen, Nanduni Nimalsiri, Sachith Seneviratne, Saman Halgamuge
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 28

RubricRM: Generative Reward Modeling via Dynamic Rubrics for Image Generation and Editing

RubricRM introduces a pairwise generative reward modeling framework that generates an input‑specific rubric—comprising evaluation dimensions, weights, and scoring criteria—to score candidate images. The method is trained in two stages: supervised fine‑tuning to learn the rubric‑based scoring paradigm and GRPO to refine dimension‑level rewards. Experiments on text‑to‑image generation and instruction‑based image editing benchmarks demonstrate that RubricRM outperforms existing specialized reward models and competes with strong proprietary MLLM judges while using smaller backbones.

By Zijian Kan, Wei Wang, Long Luo, Bing Zhao, Xuan Ren, Weixu Qiao, Wenbo Li, Hu Wei, Lin Qu
arXiv AI
Jun 17

See First, Answer Later: Visual Evidence Pre-Alignment via Sufficiency-Driven RL

arXiv:2606. 17678v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) integrate strong text reasoning with visual inputs, yet their responses can be inconsistent with the underlying images, indicating ineffective utilization of visual evidence during inference.

By Yilian Liu, Sicong Leng, Guoshun Nan, Junyi Zhu, Jiayu Huang, Minghao Sun, Xuancheng Zhu, Yisong Chen, Zexian Wei, Xiaofeng Tao