Generalized CycleGRPO for Fine-Grained Multimodal Understanding and Grounding

Xin Zhang, Haochen Wang, Beibei Lin, Zhaoxiang Zhang, Robby T. Tan +2

Fine-grained multimodal intelligence requires models to both understand a designated region and localize it from language. Existing methods learn these directions with separate objectives and task-specific annotations. We present Generalized CycleGRPO, the first unified reinforcement learning framework coupling region understanding and localization across spatial, temporal, and spatio-temporal domains. Given a region, a multimodal large language model generates candidate descriptions and then localizes each description to reconstruct the input region. Reconstruction overlap provides a verifiable reward for captioning, while individual localization rewards improve the inverse mapping. A common region-space formulation extends this cycle from image masks and boxes to video intervals and timestamped spatial evidence, without reference captions or an external language-model judge during reinforcement learning. In videos, the cycle encourages descriptions that distinguish a target event from similar recurrences. We introduce DOVE (Distinctive Occurrence-level Video-caption Evaluation), a human-verified contrastive benchmark for this temporal distinctiveness. CycleGRPO improves…