Xuecai Hu
2026
Thinking with Map: Reinforced Parallel Map-Augmented Agent for Geolocalization
Yuxiang Ji | Yong Wang | Ziyu Ma | Yiming Hu | Hailang Huang | Xuecai Hu | Guanhua Chen | Liaoni Wu | Xiangxiang Chu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Yuxiang Ji | Yong Wang | Ziyu Ma | Yiming Hu | Hailang Huang | Xuecai Hu | Guanhua Chen | Liaoni Wu | Xiangxiang Chu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
The image geolocalization task aims to predict the location where an image was taken anywhere on Earth using visual clues.Existing large vision-language model (LVLM) approaches leverage world knowledge, chain-of-thought reasoning, and agentic capabilities, but overlook a common strategy used by humans — using maps.In this work, we first equip the model Thinking with Map ability and formulate it as an agent-in-the-map loop.We develop a two-stage optimization scheme for it, including agentic reinforcement learning (RL) followed by parallel test-time scaling (TTS).The RL strengthens the agentic capability of model to improve sampling efficiency, and the parallel TTS enables the model to explore multiple candidate paths before making the final prediction, which is crucial for geolocalization.To evaluate our method on up-to-date and in-the-wild images, we further present MAPBench, a comprehensive geolocalization training and evaluation benchmark composed entirely of real-world images.Experimental results show that our method outperforms existing open- and closed-source models on most metrics, specifically improving Acc@500m from 8.0% to 22.1% compared to Gemini-3-Pro with Google Search/Map grounded mode.
Visually-Guided Policy Optimization for Multimodal Reasoning
Zengbin Wang | Feng Xiong | Liang Lin | Xuecai Hu | Yong Wang | Yanlin Wang | Man Zhang | Xiangxiang Chu
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Zengbin Wang | Feng Xiong | Liang Lin | Xuecai Hu | Yong Wang | Yanlin Wang | Man Zhang | Xiangxiang Chu
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has significantly advanced the reasoning ability of vision-language models (VLMs). However, the inherent text-dominated nature of VLMs often leads to insufficient visual faithfulness, characterized by sparse attention activation to visual tokens. More importantly, our empirical analysis reveals that temporal visual forgetting along reasoning steps exacerbates this deficiency. To bridge this gap, we propose Visually-Guided Policy Optimization (VGPO), a novel framework to reinforce visual focus during policy optimization. Specifically, VGPO initially introduces a Visual Attention Compensation mechanism that leverages visual similarity to localize and amplify visual cues, while progressively elevating visual expectations in later steps to counteract visual forgetting. Building on this mechanism, we implement a dual-grained advantage re-weighting strategy: the intra-trajectory level highlights tokens exhibiting relatively high visual activation, while the inter-trajectory level prioritizes trajectories demonstrating superior visual accumulation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that VGPO achieves better visual activation and superior performance in mathematical multimodal reasoning and visual-dependent tasks. The code has been released at https://github.com/wzb-bupt/VGPO.