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
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
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
arXiv:2609.36628v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) can generate rich video captions, yet often misidentify which person performs an action or which limb is involved, partic...
By Yanan Wang, Tingsong Li, Kaixun Jiang, Chongyang Zhong, Chenwei Xoe, Zhaohe Liao
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: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:2607. 20083v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Post-training with evaluator feedback on policy-induced samples serves as a major mechanism for improving large language models.
By Beining Wang, Weihang Su, Hongtao Tian, Hao Kong, Tao Yang, Ting Yao, Qingyi Pan, Yueyue Wu, Qingyao Ai, Min Zhang, Yiqun Liu
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:2608.22780v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) enables direct preference optimization for image editing through editing-specific rewards, which remain less developed due...
By Qichao Ma, Jikang Cheng, Ling Liang, Zhaofei Yu, Tiejun Huang, Renye Yan
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:2608. 09111v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI video generation has advanced rapidly and entered widespread commercial use.
By Ziheng Jia, Jiaying Qian, Zicheng Zhang, Xiaorong Zhu, Lancheng Gao, Xiongkuo Min
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