GRIT: Teaching MLLMs to Think with Images

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Fan, Yue, He, Xuehai, Yang, Diji, Zheng, Kaizhi, Kuo, Ching-Chen, Zheng, Yuting, Narayanaraju, Sravana Jyothi, Guan, Xinze, Wang, Xin Eric
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Fan, Yue
He, Xuehai
Yang, Diji
Zheng, Kaizhi
Kuo, Ching-Chen
Zheng, Yuting
Narayanaraju, Sravana Jyothi
Guan, Xinze
Wang, Xin Eric
author_facet Fan, Yue
He, Xuehai
Yang, Diji
Zheng, Kaizhi
Kuo, Ching-Chen
Zheng, Yuting
Narayanaraju, Sravana Jyothi
Guan, Xinze
Wang, Xin Eric
contents Recent studies have demonstrated the efficacy of using Reinforcement Learning (RL) in building reasoning models that articulate chains of thoughts prior to producing final answers. However, despite ongoing advances that aim at enabling reasoning for vision-language tasks, existing open-source visual reasoning models typically generate reasoning content with pure natural language, lacking explicit integration of visual information. This limits their ability to produce clearly articulated and visually grounded reasoning chains. To this end, we propose Grounded Reasoning with Images and Texts (GRIT), a novel method for training MLLMs to think with images. GRIT introduces a grounded reasoning paradigm, in which models generate reasoning chains that interleave natural language and explicit bounding box coordinates. These coordinates point to regions of the input image that the model consults during its reasoning process. Additionally, GRIT is equipped with a reinforcement learning approach, GRPO-GR, built upon the GRPO algorithm. GRPO-GR employs robust rewards focused on the final answer accuracy and format of the grounded reasoning output, which eliminates the need for data with reasoning chain annotations or explicit bounding box labels. As a result, GRIT achieves exceptional data efficiency, requiring as few as 20 image-question-answer triplets from existing datasets. Comprehensive evaluations demonstrate that GRIT effectively trains MLLMs to produce coherent and visually grounded reasoning chains, showing a successful unification of reasoning and grounding abilities.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_15879
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle GRIT: Teaching MLLMs to Think with Images
Fan, Yue
He, Xuehai
Yang, Diji
Zheng, Kaizhi
Kuo, Ching-Chen
Zheng, Yuting
Narayanaraju, Sravana Jyothi
Guan, Xinze
Wang, Xin Eric
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Recent studies have demonstrated the efficacy of using Reinforcement Learning (RL) in building reasoning models that articulate chains of thoughts prior to producing final answers. However, despite ongoing advances that aim at enabling reasoning for vision-language tasks, existing open-source visual reasoning models typically generate reasoning content with pure natural language, lacking explicit integration of visual information. This limits their ability to produce clearly articulated and visually grounded reasoning chains. To this end, we propose Grounded Reasoning with Images and Texts (GRIT), a novel method for training MLLMs to think with images. GRIT introduces a grounded reasoning paradigm, in which models generate reasoning chains that interleave natural language and explicit bounding box coordinates. These coordinates point to regions of the input image that the model consults during its reasoning process. Additionally, GRIT is equipped with a reinforcement learning approach, GRPO-GR, built upon the GRPO algorithm. GRPO-GR employs robust rewards focused on the final answer accuracy and format of the grounded reasoning output, which eliminates the need for data with reasoning chain annotations or explicit bounding box labels. As a result, GRIT achieves exceptional data efficiency, requiring as few as 20 image-question-answer triplets from existing datasets. Comprehensive evaluations demonstrate that GRIT effectively trains MLLMs to produce coherent and visually grounded reasoning chains, showing a successful unification of reasoning and grounding abilities.
title GRIT: Teaching MLLMs to Think with Images
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.15879