Improving the Reasoning of Multi-Image Grounding in MLLMs via Reinforcement Learning (2507.00748v1)

Abstract: Recently, Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) excel at visual grounding in single-image scenarios with textual references. However, their performance degrades when handling real-world applications involving complex multi-image compositions and multimodal instructions, which reveals limitations in cross-image reasoning and generalization. To address these challenges, we adopt a Reinforcement Learning (RL) based post-training strategy to improve the reasoning performance of MLLMs in multi-image grounding tasks. Our approach begins with synthesizing high-quality chain-of-thought (CoT) data for cold-start initialization, followed by supervised fine-tuning (SFT) using low-rank adaptation (LoRA). The cold-start training stage enables the model to identify correct solutions. Subsequently, we perform rejection sampling using the merged SFT model to curate high-quality RL data and leverage rule-based RL to guide the model toward optimal reasoning paths. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, achieving +9.04\% improvements on MIG-Bench and +4.98\% improvements on several out-of-domain reasoning grounding benchmarks over the SFT baseline. Furthermore, our approach exhibits strong generalization in multi-image perception, with gains of +3.1\% and +2.4\% over the base model on subsets of the BLINK and MMIU benchmarks, respectively.