# VIRO: Robust and Efficient Neuro-Symbolic Reasoning with Verification for Referring Expression Comprehension

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.12781 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.12781/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Multimodal reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 43 of its 50 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Jan 2026.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Multimodal reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/lr/multimodal-reasoning/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 43)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [Qwen2.5-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13923/) (2025)
- [GPT-4o System Card](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.21276/) (2024)
- [Grounding DINO: Marrying DINO with Grounded Pre-Training for Open-Set Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05499/) (2023)
- [Qwen2 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.10671/) (2024)
- [Vision Transformers for Dense Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13413/) (2021)
- [Evaluating Object Hallucination in Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10355/) (2023)
- [Ego4D: Around the World in 3,000 Hours of Egocentric Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07058/) (2021)
- [Depth Anything V2](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09414/) (2024)
- [Grounded Language-Image Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.03857/) (2021)
- [Modeling Context in Referring Expressions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.00272/) (2016)
- [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)
- [Generation and Comprehension of Unambiguous Object Descriptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.02283/) (2015)
- [MDETR -- Modulated Detection for End-to-End Multi-Modal Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.12763/) (2021)
- [OFA: Unifying Architectures, Tasks, and Modalities Through a Simple Sequence-to-Sequence Learning Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.03052/) (2022)
- [CLIPort: What and Where Pathways for Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.12098/) (2021)
- [ViperGPT: Visual Inference via Python Execution for Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08128/) (2023)
- [Visual Programming: Compositional visual reasoning without training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.11559/) (2022)
- [MAttNet: Modular Attention Network for Referring Expression Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.08186/) (2018)
- [Florence-2: Advancing a Unified Representation for a Variety of Vision Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.06242/) (2023)
- [Multi-Grained Vision Language Pre-Training: Aligning Texts with Visual Concepts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.08276/) (2021)
- [GRES: Generalized Referring Expression Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00968/) (2023)
- [VLFM: Vision-Language Frontier Maps for Zero-Shot Semantic Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03275/) (2023)
- [Universal Instance Perception as Object Discovery and Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.06674/) (2023)
- [ReCLIP: A Strong Zero-Shot Baseline for Referring Expression Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.05991/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [SymDiag: Explainable Diagnosis for LLM Reasoning via Neuro-Symbolic Verification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.08786/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Referring Expression Comprehension (REC) aims to localize the image region corresponding to a natural language query. Recent neuro-symbolic REC approaches leverage large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (VLMs) to perform compositional reasoning, decomposing queries into structured programs and executing them step-by-step. While such approaches achieve interpretable reasoning and strong zero-shot generalization, they assume that intermediate reasoning steps are accurate. However, this assumption causes cascading errors: false detections and invalid relations propagate through the reasoning chain, yielding high-confidence false positives even when no target is present in the image. To address this limitation, we introduce Verification-Integrated Reasoning Operators (VIRO), a neuro-symbolic framework that embeds lightweight operator-level verifiers within reasoning steps. Each operator executes and validates its output, such as object existence or spatial relationships, allowing the system to robustly handle no-target cases through verification-aware abstention. Our framework achieves state-of-the-art performance, reaching 61.1% balanced accuracy across target-present and no-target settings, and demonstrates generalization to real-world egocentric data. VIRO also shows high reliability with a program failure rate of at most 0.3%, efficient per-query runtime, and scalability through decoupled program generation and execution.