Yunlai Teng | Searcharxiv

arXiv2026

REC-RL: Referring expression counting via Gaussian and range-based reward optimization

Referring expression counting (REC) is an intention-driven task that requires context-aware visual reasoning. While recent vision-language models incorporate language for visual understanding, most existing REC methods rely on rulebased reinforcement learning with rewards focused primarily on final accuracy, overlooking the quality of intermediate reasoning. We propose REC-RL, a reinforcement learning framework that introduces a think-range-answer paradigm to explicitly optimize the visual reasoning process. RECRL employs Group Relative Policy Optimization and two lightweight rewards: an accuracy reward that combines range-based interval supervision with Gaussian-based precision guidance, and a format reward that enforces structured outputs. By modeling intermediate focus prediction as internal decision-making, REC-RL avoids additional annotations and better aligns with human perception. Extensive experiments demonstrate consistent improvements over strong baselines and robust generalization across benchmarks.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

SAKE: Self-aware Knowledge Exploitation-Exploration for Grounded Multimodal Named Entity Recognition

Grounded Multimodal Named Entity Recognition (GMNER) aims to extract named entities and localize their visual regions within image-text pairs, serving as a pivotal capability for various downstream applications. In open-world social media platforms, GMNER remains challenging due to the prevalence of long-tailed, rapidly evolving, and unseen entities. To tackle this, existing approaches typically rely on either external knowledge exploration through heuristic retrieval or internal knowledge exploitation via iterative refinement in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). However, heuristic retrieval often introduces noisy or conflicting evidence that degrades precision on known entities, while solely internal exploitation is constrained by the knowledge boundaries of MLLMs and prone to hallucinations. To address this, we propose SAKE, an end-to-end agentic framework that harmonizes internal knowledge exploitation and external knowledge exploration via self-aware reasoning and adaptive search tool invocation. We implement this via a two-stage training paradigm. First, we propose Difficulty-aware Search Tag Generation, which quantifies the model's entity-level uncertainty through multiple forward samplings to produce explicit knowledge-gap signals. Based on these signals, we construct SAKE-SeCoT, a high-quality Chain-of-Thought dataset that equips the model with basic self-awareness and tool-use capabilities through supervised fine-tuning. Second, we employ agentic reinforcement learning with a hybrid reward function that penalizes unnecessary retrieval, enabling the model to evolve from rigid search imitation to genuine self-aware decision-making about when retrieval is truly necessary. Extensive experiments on two widely used social media benchmarks demonstrate SAKE's effectiveness.

cs.IR↗