AVATAR: Reinforcement Learning to See, Hear, and Reason Over Video

Yogesh Kulkarni, Pooyan Fazli; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2026, pp. 7912-7922

Multimodal reasoning over long-horizon video is challenging due to the need for precise spatiotemporal fusion and alignment across modalities. While recent methods such as Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) have shown promise in this domain, they suffer from three key limitations: (1) data inefficiency from their on-policy design, (2) a vanishing advantage problem, where identical or near-identical rewards within a group eliminate the learning signal by producing zero-valued advantages, and (3) uniform credit assignment that fails to emphasize critical reasoning steps. We introduce AVATAR (Audio-Video Agent for Alignment and Reasoning, a framework that addresses these limitations through two core components: (1) an off-policy training architecture that improves sample efficiency and resolves vanishing advantages by reusing past experiences with greater reward diversity, and (2) Temporal Advantage Shaping (TAS), a credit assignment strategy that emphasizes early (planning) and late (synthesis) reasoning phases. AVATAR achieves strong performance across various benchmarks, outperforming the Qwen2.5-Omni baseline by +5.4 on MMVU, +4.9 on OmniBench, and +4.5 on Video-Holmes. Furthermore, it surpasses standard GRPO by +3.7 on OmniBench and +1.9 on Video-Holmes, while demonstrating 5 times sample efficiency, requiring 80 fewer generated completions to reach target performance.