Omni-R1: Reinforcement Learning for Omnimodal Reasoning via Two-System Collaboration

Hao Chen (Harbin Institute of Technology) · Wen Wang (Alibaba Group) · Canyu Zhao (Zhejiang University) · Mingyu Liu (Zhejiang University) · Muzhi Zhu (Zhejiang University) · Chunhua Shen (University of Adelaide) · Hao Zhong (Zhejiang University) · Zongze Du (Zhejiang University) · Zheng Huang (Zhejiang University)
detail understanding systemend-to-end frameworkglobal reasoning systemgroup relative policy optimizationhierarchical rewardskeyframe selectionlong-horizon reasoningmultimodal hallucinationomnimodal modelsout-of-domain generalizationpixel-level groundingreasoning video object segmentationreferring audio-visual segmentationreinforcement learningscalable foundation modelstask reformulation

Long-horizon video-audio reasoning and fine-grained pixel understanding impose conflicting requirements on omnimodal models: dense temporal coverage demands many low-resolution frames, whereas precise grounding calls for high-resolution inputs. We tackle this trade-off with a two-system architecture: a Global Reasoning System selects informative keyframes and rewrites the task at low spatial cost, while a Detail Understanding System performs pixel-level grounding on the selected high-resolution snippets. Because "optimal" keyframe selection and reformulation are ambiguous and hard to supervise, we formulate them as a reinforcement-learning (RL) problem and present Omni-R1, an end-to-end RL framework built on Group Relative Policy Optimization. Omni-R1 trains the Global Reasoning System through hierarchical rewards obtained via online collaboration with the Detail Understanding System, requiring only one epoch of RL on small task splits. Experiments on two challenging benchmarks, Referring Audio-Visual Segmentation (RefAVS) and Reasoning Video Object Segmentation (REVOS), show that Omni-R1 not only surpasses strong supervised baselines but also outperforms specialized state-of-the-art models, while substantially improving out-of-domain generalization and mitigating multimodal hallucination. Our results demonstrate the first successful application of RL to large-scale omnimodal reasoning and highlight a scalable path toward universally foundation models.