UniVG-R1: Reasoning Guided Universal Visual Grounding with Reinforcement Learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Bai, Sule, Li, Mingxing, Liu, Yong, Tang, Jing, Zhang, Haoji, Sun, Lei, Chu, Xiangxiang, Tang, Yansong
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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_version_ 1866910957181075456
author Bai, Sule
Li, Mingxing
Liu, Yong
Tang, Jing
Zhang, Haoji
Sun, Lei
Chu, Xiangxiang
Tang, Yansong
author_facet Bai, Sule
Li, Mingxing
Liu, Yong
Tang, Jing
Zhang, Haoji
Sun, Lei
Chu, Xiangxiang
Tang, Yansong
contents Traditional visual grounding methods primarily focus on single-image scenarios with simple textual references. However, extending these methods to real-world scenarios that involve implicit and complex instructions, particularly in conjunction with multiple images, poses significant challenges, which is mainly due to the lack of advanced reasoning ability across diverse multi-modal contexts. In this work, we aim to address the more practical universal grounding task, and propose UniVG-R1, a reasoning guided multimodal large language model (MLLM) for universal visual grounding, which enhances reasoning capabilities through reinforcement learning (RL) combined with cold-start data. Specifically, we first construct a high-quality Chain-of-Thought (CoT) grounding dataset, annotated with detailed reasoning chains, to guide the model towards correct reasoning paths via supervised fine-tuning. Subsequently, we perform rule-based reinforcement learning to encourage the model to identify correct reasoning chains, thereby incentivizing its reasoning capabilities. In addition, we identify a difficulty bias arising from the prevalence of easy samples as RL training progresses, and we propose a difficulty-aware weight adjustment strategy to further strengthen the performance. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of UniVG-R1, which achieves state-of-the-art performance on MIG-Bench with a 9.1% improvement over the previous method. Furthermore, our model exhibits strong generalizability, achieving an average improvement of 23.4% in zero-shot performance across four image and video reasoning grounding benchmarks. The project page can be accessed at https://amap-ml.github.io/UniVG-R1-page/.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_14231
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publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle UniVG-R1: Reasoning Guided Universal Visual Grounding with Reinforcement Learning
Bai, Sule
Li, Mingxing
Liu, Yong
Tang, Jing
Zhang, Haoji
Sun, Lei
Chu, Xiangxiang
Tang, Yansong
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Traditional visual grounding methods primarily focus on single-image scenarios with simple textual references. However, extending these methods to real-world scenarios that involve implicit and complex instructions, particularly in conjunction with multiple images, poses significant challenges, which is mainly due to the lack of advanced reasoning ability across diverse multi-modal contexts. In this work, we aim to address the more practical universal grounding task, and propose UniVG-R1, a reasoning guided multimodal large language model (MLLM) for universal visual grounding, which enhances reasoning capabilities through reinforcement learning (RL) combined with cold-start data. Specifically, we first construct a high-quality Chain-of-Thought (CoT) grounding dataset, annotated with detailed reasoning chains, to guide the model towards correct reasoning paths via supervised fine-tuning. Subsequently, we perform rule-based reinforcement learning to encourage the model to identify correct reasoning chains, thereby incentivizing its reasoning capabilities. In addition, we identify a difficulty bias arising from the prevalence of easy samples as RL training progresses, and we propose a difficulty-aware weight adjustment strategy to further strengthen the performance. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of UniVG-R1, which achieves state-of-the-art performance on MIG-Bench with a 9.1% improvement over the previous method. Furthermore, our model exhibits strong generalizability, achieving an average improvement of 23.4% in zero-shot performance across four image and video reasoning grounding benchmarks. The project page can be accessed at https://amap-ml.github.io/UniVG-R1-page/.
title UniVG-R1: Reasoning Guided Universal Visual Grounding with Reinforcement Learning
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.14231