arXiv Computer Vision

Token-Level Video Reinforcement Learning

arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 24

Annotations as Rollouts: Efficient and Scalable Reinforcement Learning for Video MLLMs

The paper introduces OraRL, a reinforcement learning framework that leverages annotations as oracle rollouts to improve sample efficiency and scalability for video multimodal large language models (MLLMs). By decoupling advantage estimation and employing sign‑balanced pruning, OraRL achieves faster training and better performance across multiple video‑perception benchmarks compared to existing methods. The approach scales from 0.8B to 9B parameters and handles up to 100k prompts, delivering significant gains in temporal mIoU, tracking accuracy, segmentation, and spatial‑intelligence metrics.

By Yunheng Li, Guohong Mu, Hao Li, Shengsheng Qian, Dingwen Zhang, Qibin Hou, Ming-Ming Cheng
arXiv AI
Jul 24

TOPReward: Token Probabilities as Hidden Zero-Shot Rewards for Robotics

arXiv:2602. 19313v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: General-purpose robot learning requires dense, instruction-conditioned feedback that can distinguish meaningful task progress from stalled, failed, or partially completed behavior.

By Shirui Chen, Cole Harrison, Ying-Chun Lee, Angela Jin Yang, Zhongzheng Ren, Lillian J. Ratliff, Jiafei Duan, Dieter Fox, Ranjay Krishna
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 23

Video-HopChain: Multi-Hop Questions and Confidence-Gated Exploration for Video Reasoning Models

Video-HopChain introduces a new dataset of 22,550 multi‑hop video questions over 13,378 videos, each question consisting of three to six yes/no sub‑questions whose integer answers sum to a verifiable reward. Training a Qwen3‑VL‑8B model with GRPO on this dataset improves performance across eight video‑understanding benchmarks from 55.4 to 57.9, and the addition of Confidence‑Gated Exploration (CGE) raises the mean to 59.3. The authors release the dataset, checkpoint, and training code for further research.

By Trung Nguyen Quang, Yuhao Dong, Shuo Sun, Shuai Liu, Shulin Tian, Kim-Hui Yap, Ziwei Liu
arXiv AI
6d 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 AI
Sep 21

Prompt-Driven Exploration: Language as an Exploration Space for VLA Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2607.08837v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Exploration is essential to RL since a policy cannot improve by repeatedly sampling the behaviors it already prefers. Standard methods inject...

By Sunshine Jiang, John Marangola, David Zhang, Raghuram Kowdeed, Ruiyang Luo, Nitish Dashora, Richard Li, Pulkit Agrawal, Zhang-Wei Hong
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 7

Learning to Credit the Right Steps: Objective-aware Process Optimization for Visual Generation

The paper introduces Objective-aware Trajectory Credit Assignment (OTCA), a framework that refines reinforcement learning for diffusion-based visual generation. OTCA decomposes credit across denoising steps and allocates multiple reward signals adaptively, addressing the coarse, uniform reward assignment of existing GRPO pipelines. Experiments demonstrate that OTCA consistently enhances image and video generation quality across various metrics.

By Rui Li, Ke Hao, Yuanzhi Liang, Haibin Huang, Chi Zhang, Yun Gu, Xuelong Li
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