cs.CVJun 27, 2026

Efficient Spatio-Temporal Grounding with Multimodal Large Models via Second-Level Tracking and RL Verification

Authors: Tianshu ZhangYan WangJi QiLijie Wen

Organizations: Tsinghua University

Abstract

Spatio-temporal grounding in long videos requires precise temporal localization and robust object tracking conditioned on natural-language queries. While recent vision-language models (VLMs) show strong reasoning ability, directly applying frame-by-frame inference to long sequences is computationally expensive and unstable. We propose a practical pipeline that shifts from frame-level to second-level tracking and performs cross-second smoothing to preserve continuity while reducing sequence length. To improve reasoning supervision, we synthesize chain-of-thought style trajectories using advanced multimodal models for temporal localization and target selection, and replace generated spatio-temporal coordinates with ground-truth annotations to avoid noisy supervision. We further optimize the policy with reinforcement learning using a verifier based on t_IoU+mv_IoUt\_\mathrm{IoU}+mv\_\mathrm{IoU}. Experiments across multiple FPS settings show that our method achieves a strong trade-off between efficiency and localization quality.

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