Qiuyue Zhang
Author directory2026
VIGOR: Outcome-Contrastive Visual Grounding for Multimodal Policy Optimization
Haohao Xu | Yuyao Ge | Qiuyue Zhang | Zhaoli Deng | HongLin Liu | Sheng Ang | Likang Wu | Shenghua Liu | Hongke Zhao
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Haohao Xu | Yuyao Ge | Qiuyue Zhang | Zhaoli Deng | HongLin Liu | Sheng Ang | Likang Wu | Shenghua Liu | Hongke Zhao
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
While reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has advanced multimodal reasoning, coarse outcome rewards offer limited guidance for assigning credit to visual evidence. Analyzing same-prompt rollout groups, we observe that different outcomes exhibit distinct temporal patterns of measured visual dependency across reasoning segments. We therefore propose **VIGOR** (**Vi**sual **G**rounding **O**utcome-contrastive **R**einforcement), a policy optimization method that converts these group-wise contrasts into fine-grained supervision. VIGOR constructs outcome-conditioned prototypes from temporal visual fingerprints to reweight trajectories, uses segment-level contrasts to prioritize token gradients, and allocates the visual budget according to group difficulty. It requires no additional annotations or reward models and introduces no inference-time overhead. Across eight multimodal reasoning benchmarks, VIGOR achieves 57.5% average accuracy with Qwen2.5-VL-7B, improving over VPPO by 1.6 points. Controlled experiments further validate VIGOR on Qwen2.5-VL-3B and InternVL2.5-4B; on the latter, it outperforms VPPO on all eight tasks by 0.96 points on average. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/beck83879-bit/VIGOR.