UniVG-R1: Reasoning Guided Universal Visual Grounding with Reinforcement
  Learning
Authors: name: Sule Bai, name: Mingxing Li, name: Yong Liu, name: Jing Tang, name: Haoji Zhang, name: Lei Sun, name: Xiangxiang Chu, name: Yansong Tang

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/.