RegionReasoner: Region-Grounded Multi-Round Visual Reasoning

ICLR 2026 Conference Submission5745 Authors

Keywords: large vision-language models multi-round visual reasoning

TL;DR: We propose RegionReasoner, a reinforcement learning framework that enforces grounded reasoning by requiring each reasoning trace to explicitly cite the corresponding reference bounding boxes.

Abstract:

Large vision-language models have achieved remarkable progress in visual reasoning, yet most existing systems rely on single-step or text-only reasoning, limiting their ability to iteratively refine understanding across multiple visual contexts.
To address this limitation, we introduce a new multi-round visual reasoning benchmark with training and test sets spanning both detection and segmentation tasks, enabling systematic evaluation under iterative reasoning scenarios.
We further propose RegionReasoner, a reinforcement learning framework that enforces grounded reasoning by requiring each reasoning trace to explicitly cite the corresponding reference bounding boxes, while maintaining semantic coherence via a global–local consistency reward.
This reward extracts key objects and nouns from both global scene captions and region-level captions, aligning them with the reasoning trace to ensure consistency across reasoning steps.
RegionReasoner is optimized with structured rewards combining grounding fidelity and global–local semantic alignment.
Experiments on detection and segmentation tasks show that RegionReasoner-7B, together with our newly introduced benchmark RegionDial-Bench, considerably improves multi-round reasoning accuracy, spatial grounding precision, and global–local consistency, establishing a strong baseline for this emerging research direction.

Primary Area: foundation or frontier models, including LLMs

Submission Number: 5745