Ground-R1: Incentivizing Grounded Visual Reasoning via Reinforcement Learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Cao, Meng, Zhao, Haoze, Zhang, Can, Chang, Xiaojun, Reid, Ian, Liang, Xiaodan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Cao, Meng
Zhao, Haoze
Zhang, Can
Chang, Xiaojun
Reid, Ian
Liang, Xiaodan
author_facet Cao, Meng
Zhao, Haoze
Zhang, Can
Chang, Xiaojun
Reid, Ian
Liang, Xiaodan
contents Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have become powerful general-purpose assistants, yet their predictions often lack reliability and interpretability due to insufficient grounding in visual evidence. The emerging thinking-with-images paradigm seeks to address this issue by explicitly anchoring reasoning to image regions. However, we empirically find that most existing methods suffer from a systematic scale-driven bias in optimization, where training rewards are dominated by large visual regions, suppressing learning from small but semantically critical evidence and leading to spurious grounding at inference time. To address this limitation, we propose Ground-R1, a de-biased thinking-with-images framework trained via a novel Scale Relative Policy Optimization (SRPO) objective that replaces standard GRPO. Specifically, our SRPO recalibrates reward learning across evidence regions of different sizes through scale-aware binning and intra-/inter-bin comparisons, enabling balanced credit assignment during training. Experimental results on general LVLM, high-resolution, and visual grounding benchmarks validate the effectiveness of Ground-R1 and show that SRPO yields consistent gains over standard GRPO in both response accuracy and evidence grounding.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_20272
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Ground-R1: Incentivizing Grounded Visual Reasoning via Reinforcement Learning
Cao, Meng
Zhao, Haoze
Zhang, Can
Chang, Xiaojun
Reid, Ian
Liang, Xiaodan
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have become powerful general-purpose assistants, yet their predictions often lack reliability and interpretability due to insufficient grounding in visual evidence. The emerging thinking-with-images paradigm seeks to address this issue by explicitly anchoring reasoning to image regions. However, we empirically find that most existing methods suffer from a systematic scale-driven bias in optimization, where training rewards are dominated by large visual regions, suppressing learning from small but semantically critical evidence and leading to spurious grounding at inference time. To address this limitation, we propose Ground-R1, a de-biased thinking-with-images framework trained via a novel Scale Relative Policy Optimization (SRPO) objective that replaces standard GRPO. Specifically, our SRPO recalibrates reward learning across evidence regions of different sizes through scale-aware binning and intra-/inter-bin comparisons, enabling balanced credit assignment during training. Experimental results on general LVLM, high-resolution, and visual grounding benchmarks validate the effectiveness of Ground-R1 and show that SRPO yields consistent gains over standard GRPO in both response accuracy and evidence grounding.
title Ground-R1: Incentivizing Grounded Visual Reasoning via Reinforcement Learning
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.20272