OraRL README

The project's README from github.com/HVision-NKU/OraRL. As one markdown file: README.md.

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OraRL

Annotations as Rollouts

Efficient and scalable reinforcement learning for unified video MLLMs

Yunheng Li · Guohong Mu · Hao Li · Shengsheng Qian · Dingwen Zhang · Qibin Hou · Ming-Ming Cheng

📄 Paper   ·   🌐 Project Page   ·   🎮 Live Demo   ·   🤗 Models (4B / 9B)

⚙️ Environment   ·   🚀 Training   ·   📊 Evaluation   ·   ⚖️ License

Papers with Code: SOTA on ActivityNet-TimeLens Papers with Code: SOTA on Charades-TimeLens Papers with Code: SOTA on MeViS Papers with Code: SOTA on QVHighlights-TimeLens Validation Papers with Code: SOTA on VideoHolmes Papers with Code: #2 on ReasonVOS

View all 11 verified evaluations on Papers with Code

Animated OraRL method preview

▶ Click the image to watch the 1:38 project overview.

Why OraRL

OraRL in One Update

Animated OraRL framework

An OraRL update separates reliable annotation guidance from on-policy normalization:

  1. Build the group: append one serialized annotation rollout to the policy samples generated for the same prompt.
  2. Keep the baseline on-policy: estimate the group baseline from policy rewards only.
  3. Guide and select: convert the annotation-policy reward gap into a correction, then retain a sign-balanced subset for the update.

This design uses task-native annotations directly and requires no chain-of-thought supervision or decoding.

Video-ORA Results

Video-ORA-9B results across seven task families

Dataset-Level Results

Dataset-level benchmark matrix comparing Video-ORA with multimodal baselines

Video-ORA-9B leads the matched seven-family comparison without CoT decoding. Best and second-best values are highlighted per row; † denotes an original-report value whose frame, prompt, split, or decoding settings may differ. Averages require complete family coverage.

Model Scaling

Animated Video-ORA model scaling from 0.8B to 9B

Data Scaling

Animated OraRL data scaling and reward dynamics

Models

Model Backbone Released recipe Weights
Video-ORA-9B Qwen3.5-9B orarl_9b.yaml Hugging Face
Video-ORA-4B Qwen3.5-4B orarl_4b.yaml Hugging Face

vLLM Serving

Both Video-ORA checkpoints load directly with vLLM 0.19.1 for OpenAI-compatible serving:

MODEL=OraRL/Video-ORA-9B

vllm serve "$MODEL" \
  --served-model-name Video-ORA-9B \
  --trust-remote-code \
  --dtype bfloat16 \
  --tensor-parallel-size 1 \
  --max-model-len 131072 \
  --limit-mm-per-prompt '{"image": 1, "video": 1}'

Set --tensor-parallel-size to the GPU count for multi-GPU deployment and lower --max-model-len on smaller-memory devices. Use enable_thinking=false in the chat template for answer-only inference.

Use OraRL

The release is organized around three user-facing workflows:

  1. Environment: install the pinned CUDA stack that covers both the bundled trainer and the evaluators.
  2. Training: prepare licensed local training data and launch GRPO or OraRL on one or multiple nodes.
  3. Evaluation: download Video-ORA and OraRL-Data, then run a smoke test or the complete paper suite.

Training and evaluation are dry runs by default; inspect the resolved command before adding --run. Checkpoints and evaluation media are hosted under the OraRL Hugging Face organization.

Acknowledgements

OraRL is built on veRL — a high-performance RL framework with HybridEngine. We thank its authors and contributors for open-sourcing the training infrastructure.

License

OraRL source is released under Apache-2.0. Datasets, models, benchmarks, and optional dependencies retain their original licenses; see NOTICE.

Citation

If you find OraRL useful, please consider giving this repository a ⭐ and citing our paper.

@article{li2026orarl,
  title   = {Annotations as Rollouts: Efficient and Scalable
             Reinforcement Learning for Video MLLMs},
  author  = {Li, Yunheng and Mu, Guohong and Li, Hao and
             Qian, Shengsheng and Zhang, Dingwen and Hou, Qibin
             and Cheng, Ming-Ming},
  journal = {arXiv preprint arXiv:2608.20492},
  year    = {2026},
  url     = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.20492}
}

OraRL (HVision-NKU/OraRL)

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What is this?OraRL is a reinforcement learning framework that treats annotations as rollouts to efficiently train unified video multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) across seven video task families.
Is this a ready-to-use app or a research training framework?It is a research codebase built on veRL, bundling the training recipe, evaluators, and released Video-ORA checkpoints rather than a plug-and-play app.
How do I get OraRL running?Follow three workflows: install the pinned CUDA stack for the Environment, prepare licensed local training data and launch GRPO or OraRL on one or multiple nodes, then download Video-ORA and OraRL-Data to run evaluation.
What do I need to serve the released models?You need CUDA GPUs and vLLM 0.19.1 to load the Video-ORA-4B/9B checkpoints (Qwen3.5 backbones) for OpenAI-compatible inference, adjusting tensor-parallel-size and max-model-len to your hardware.
Any gotchas before I start training or evaluating?Training and evaluation commands are dry runs by default, so you must inspect the resolved command and add --run to actually execute, and you need to license and prepare your own local training data first.
What does annotation-as-rollout actually do?It appends one serialized annotation as a reliable positive rollout to the policy-generated samples for the same prompt, keeping the RL baseline purely on-policy while still using the annotation-policy reward gap to guide and select updates.
Which video tasks can one OraRL update handle?A single update rule covers seven task families: temporal grounding, spatial grounding, segmentation, tracking, spatial-temporal grounding, video QA, and spatial intelligence.
How much does the efficient training mode speed things up?Sign-balanced pruning on the 4B model gives 1.48x faster updates (92.5 to 62.4 s/step) and cuts peak per-GPU memory from 62.4 GB to 50.9 GB.
What model sizes are available?Two Video-ORA checkpoints are released, 4B and 9B, both built on Qwen3.5 backbones and hosted on Hugging Face.
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CommitAug 28
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