Saliency-R1: Incentivizing Unified Saliency Reasoning Capability in MLLM with Confidence-Guided Reinforcement Learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Li, Long, Ji, Shuichen, Luo, Ziyang, Li, Zhihui, Zhang, Dingwen, Han, Junwei, Liu, Nian
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Li, Long
Ji, Shuichen
Luo, Ziyang
Li, Zhihui
Zhang, Dingwen
Han, Junwei
Liu, Nian
author_facet Li, Long
Ji, Shuichen
Luo, Ziyang
Li, Zhihui
Zhang, Dingwen
Han, Junwei
Liu, Nian
contents Although multimodal large language models (MLLMs) excel in high-level vision-language reasoning, they lack inherent awareness of visual saliency, making it difficult to identify key visual elements. To bridge this gap, we propose Saliency-R1, the first unified MLLM framework that jointly tackles three representative and heterogeneous saliency tasks: Salient Object Detection (SOD), Salient Instance Segmentation (SIS), and Co-salient Object Detection (CoSOD), enhancing the model's capacity for saliency reasoning. We introduce a textual interface with structured tags (<rg>, <ins>) to encode region- and instance-level referring expressions, enabling a single referring segmenter to produce task-appropriate masks. To train the MLLM efficiently, we propose Confidence-Guided Policy Optimization (CGPO), a novel single-sample reinforcement learning algorithm. CGPO improves on GRPO by replacing group-normalized advantages with a per-sample signal based on reward-confidence discrepancy, thereby reducing computational waste, mitigating signal dilution, and lowering training overhead. Our model exceeds or matches the performance of robust open/closed-source MLLMs and specialized state-of-the-art methods across all three tasks, demonstrating the efficacy of our framework in saliency reasoning.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_00396
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Saliency-R1: Incentivizing Unified Saliency Reasoning Capability in MLLM with Confidence-Guided Reinforcement Learning
Li, Long
Ji, Shuichen
Luo, Ziyang
Li, Zhihui
Zhang, Dingwen
Han, Junwei
Liu, Nian
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Although multimodal large language models (MLLMs) excel in high-level vision-language reasoning, they lack inherent awareness of visual saliency, making it difficult to identify key visual elements. To bridge this gap, we propose Saliency-R1, the first unified MLLM framework that jointly tackles three representative and heterogeneous saliency tasks: Salient Object Detection (SOD), Salient Instance Segmentation (SIS), and Co-salient Object Detection (CoSOD), enhancing the model's capacity for saliency reasoning. We introduce a textual interface with structured tags (<rg>, <ins>) to encode region- and instance-level referring expressions, enabling a single referring segmenter to produce task-appropriate masks. To train the MLLM efficiently, we propose Confidence-Guided Policy Optimization (CGPO), a novel single-sample reinforcement learning algorithm. CGPO improves on GRPO by replacing group-normalized advantages with a per-sample signal based on reward-confidence discrepancy, thereby reducing computational waste, mitigating signal dilution, and lowering training overhead. Our model exceeds or matches the performance of robust open/closed-source MLLMs and specialized state-of-the-art methods across all three tasks, demonstrating the efficacy of our framework in saliency reasoning.
title Saliency-R1: Incentivizing Unified Saliency Reasoning Capability in MLLM with Confidence-Guided Reinforcement Learning
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.00396