English

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

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2026-06-27 v1 Artificial Intelligence

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.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2606.29023,
  title  = {Efficient Spatio-Temporal Grounding with Multimodal Large Models via Second-Level Tracking and RL Verification},
  author = {Tianshu Zhang and Yan Wang and Ji Qi and Lijie Wen},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2606.29023},
  year   = {2026}
}