# Ground-R1: Incentivizing Grounded Visual Reasoning via Reinforcement Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.20272 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.20272/

## Key facts

- Cited by 49 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Multimodal reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 72 of its 89 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 May 2025.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Multimodal reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/lr/multimodal-reasoning/)
- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [Embodied and 3D vision-language models](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/embodied-and-3d-vision-language-models/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 72)

- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03300/) (2024)
- [DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12948/) (2025)
- [Qwen2.5-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13923/) (2025)
- [Improved Baselines with Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03744/) (2023)
- [Qwen2-VL: Enhancing Vision-Language Model's Perception of the World at Any Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12191/) (2024)
- [Grounding DINO: Marrying DINO with Grounded Pre-Training for Open-Set Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05499/) (2023)
- [Gemini 1.5: Unlocking multimodal understanding across millions of tokens of context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05530/) (2024)
- [Tree of Thoughts: Deliberate Problem Solving with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10601/) (2023)
- [LLaVA-OneVision: Easy Visual Task Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03326/) (2024)
- [Evaluating Object Hallucination in Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10355/) (2023)
- [Towards VQA Models That Can Read](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08920/) (2019)
- [MME: A Comprehensive Evaluation Benchmark for Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.13394/) (2023)
- [Expanding Performance Boundaries of Open-Source Multimodal Models with Model, Data, and Test-Time Scaling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.05271/) (2024)
- [Flickr30k Entities: Collecting Region-to-Phrase Correspondences for Richer Image-to-Sentence Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04870/) (2015)
- [DocVQA: A Dataset for VQA on Document Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.00398/) (2020)
- [MM-Vet: Evaluating Large Multimodal Models for Integrated Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.02490/) (2023)
- [Kosmos-2: Grounding Multimodal Large Language Models to the World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.14824/) (2023)
- [How Far Are We to GPT-4V? Closing the Gap to Commercial Multimodal Models with Open-Source Suites](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16821/) (2024)
- [SEED-Bench: Benchmarking Multimodal LLMs with Generative Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.16125/) (2023)
- [Chameleon: Mixed-Modal Early-Fusion Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.09818/) (2024)
- [Shikra: Unleashing Multimodal LLM's Referential Dialogue Magic](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.15195/) (2023)
- [Generation and Comprehension of Unambiguous Object Descriptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.02283/) (2015)
- [Graph of Thoughts: Solving Elaborate Problems with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09687/) (2023)
- [Multimodal Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.00923/) (2023)
- [CogVLM: Visual Expert for Pretrained Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.03079/) (2023)
- [Vision-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.06749/) (2025)
- [ViperGPT: Visual Inference via Python Execution for Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08128/) (2023)
- [Towards Reasoning in Large Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10403/) (2022)
- [Visual Programming: Compositional visual reasoning without training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.11559/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 49)

- [The Landscape of Agentic Reinforcement Learning for LLMs: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.02547/) (2025)
- [A Survey of Reinforcement Learning for Large Reasoning Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.08827/) (2025)
- [Traceable Evidence Enhanced Visual Grounded Reasoning: Evaluation and Methodology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.07999/) (2025)
- [Explain Before You Answer: A Survey on Compositional Visual Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.17298/) (2025)
- [Embed-RL: Reinforcement Learning for Reasoning-Driven Multimodal Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.13823/) (2026)
- [LensWalk: Agentic Video Understanding by Planning How You See in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.24558/) (2026)
- [Imagination Helps Visual Reasoning, But Not Yet in Latent Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.22766/) (2026)
- [DeFacto: Counterfactual Thinking with Images for Enforcing Evidence-Grounded and Faithful Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.20912/) (2025)
- [textscGUI-Spotlight: Adaptive Iterative Focus Refinement for Enhanced GUI Visual Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.04039/) (2025)
- [Reinforcement Learning for Large Model: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.08189/) (2025)
- [Seeing with You: Perception-Reasoning Coevolution for Multimodal Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.28618/) (2026)
- [CreatiParser: Generative Image Parsing of Raster Graphic Designs into Editable Layers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.19632/) (2026)
- [VG-Refiner: Towards Tool-Refined Referring Grounded Reasoning via Agentic Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.06373/) (2025)
- [Staying VIGILant: Mitigating Visual Laziness via Counterfactual Visual Alignment in MLLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.26387/) (2026)
- [PhyBlock: A Progressive Benchmark for Physical Understanding and Planning via 3D Block Assembly](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.08708/) (2025)
- [Evidence-Grounded Trustworthy Multimodal Reasoning and Evaluation Benchmark in Complex Urban Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.09557/) (2025)
- [Mixture-of-Visual-Thoughts: Exploring Context-Adaptive Reasoning Mode Selection for General Visual Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.22746/) (2025)
- [Video Spatial Reasoning with Object-Centric 3D Rollout](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.13190/) (2025)
- [Can Vision Language Models Assess Graphic Design Aesthetics? A Benchmark, Evaluation, and Dataset Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.01083/) (2026)
- [DRS-GUI: Dynamic Region Search for Training-Free GUI Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.15542/) (2026)
- [Visual serial processing deficits explain divergences in human and VLM reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.25142/) (2025)
- [Training Multi-Image Vision Agents via End2End Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.08980/) (2025)
- [OddGridBench: Exposing the Lack of Fine-Grained Visual Discrepancy Sensitivity in Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.09326/) (2026)
- [Annotations as Rollouts: Efficient and Scalable Reinforcement Learning for Video MLLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.20492/) (2026)
- [Look as You Think: Unifying Reasoning and Visual Evidence Attribution for Verifiable Document RAG via Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.12003/) (2025)
- [Disentangling Perception and Reasoning in Multimodal LLMs via Reward Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.00215/) (2026)
- [APPO: Attention-guided Perception Policy Optimization for Video Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.23823/) (2026)
- [When Thinking Hurts: Mitigating Visual Forgetting in Video Reasoning via Frame Repetition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.16256/) (2026)
- [From Web to Pixels: Bringing Agentic Search into Visual Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.12497/) (2026)
- [DiVE-k: Differential Visual Reasoning for Fine-grained Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.18305/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

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.