MIRG-RL: Multi-Image Reasoning and Grounding with Reinforcement Learning (2509.21788v1)

Abstract: Multi-image reasoning and grounding require understanding complex cross-image relationships at both object levels and image levels. Current Large Visual LLMs (LVLMs) face two critical challenges: the lack of cross-image reasoning capabilities and insufficient cross-image reference reward modeling. To address these issues, we propose a unified framework - Multi-Image Reasoning and Grounding with Reinforcement Learning (MIRG-RL). Specifically, our two-stage training paradigm combines supervised fine-tuning with annotated trajectories and image-aware reinforcement learning optimization, progressively developing multi-image reasoning capabilities. Furthermore, we innovatively propose a method for constructing the trajectory data, which integrates object-level and image-level annotation information, and use this method to generate a lightweight reasoning-enhanced dataset. To effectively resolve cross-image ambiguities, we design an image-aware RL policy with dual reward functions for objects and images. Experiments demonstrate that MIRG-RL achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in multi-image grounding benchmarks, attaining 64.82% on cross-image reasoning tasks - exceeding the previous best method by 1%. The code and dataset have been released at https://github.com/ZEUS2035/MIRG-RL.