FrameGRPO: Incentivizing Video Reasoning via Multi-Frame Rollouts and Temporal Credit

Overview & Synopsis

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards, particularly Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), has improved video reasoning in multimodal large language models. However, standard video GRPO varies only linguistic trajectories while conditioning every rollout in a group on the same sampled frames, which can produce homogeneous rewards and weaken group-relative learning when the shared visual evidence is insufficient or distracting. We propose \textbf{FrameGRPO}, a simple and effective reinforcement-learning framework that requires neither auxiliary networks nor changes to the model architecture. Specifically, FrameGRPO combines two lightweight components: (1) \textbf{Multi-Frame Rollouts}, which use only uniform temporal subsampling of a single maximal-frame decode to construct aligned views that diversify visual evidence and reasoning trajectories; and (2) \textbf{Gated Temporal Efficiency Credit}, which selectively reinforces a correct lower-ratio trajectory when all rollouts in a fixed full-ratio reference subset fail, without imposing an unconditional preference for fewer frames. Extensive experiments across diverse video understanding and reasoning benchmarks demonstrate robust overall improvements over standard GRPO, highlighting temporal-view diversification as an effective mechanism for exploration and credit assignment in video MLLMs.