{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2026,10,1]],"date-time":"2026-10-01T03:13:01Z","timestamp":1790824381846,"version":"4.1.0"},"reference-count":0,"publisher":"Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI)","issue":"8","content-domain":{"domain":[],"crossmark-restriction":false},"short-container-title":["AAAI"],"abstract":"<jats:p>Recent advances in multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) have significantly improved object-level grounding and region captioning. However, they remain limited in visual relation understanding, struggling even with binary relation detection, let alone N-ary relations involving multiple semantic roles. The core reason is the lack of modeling for structural semantic dependencies among multi-entities, leading to over-reliance on language priors (e.g., defaulting to \"person drinks a milk\" if a person is merely holding it). To this end, we propose Relation-R1, the first unified relation comprehension framework that explicitly integrates cognitive chain-of-thought (CoT)-guided supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and group relative policy optimization (GRPO) within a reinforcement learning (RL) paradigm. Specifically, we first establish foundational reasoning capabilities via SFT, enforcing structured outputs with thinking processes. Then, GRPO is utilized to refine these outputs via multi-rewards optimization, prioritizing visual-semantic grounding over language-induced biases, thereby improving generalization capability. Furthermore, we investigate the impact of various CoT strategies within this framework, demonstrating that a specific-to-general progressive approach in CoT guidance further improves generalization, especially in capturing synonymous N-ary relations. Extensive experiments on widely-used PSG and SWiG datasets demonstrate that Relation-R1 achieves state-of-the-art performance in both binary and N-ary relation understanding.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.1609\/aaai.v40i8.37557","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2026,3,17]],"date-time":"2026-03-17T23:27:23Z","timestamp":1773790043000},"page":"6306-6314","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":3,"title":["Relation-R1: Progressively Cognitive Chain-of-Thought Guided Reinforcement Learning for Unified Relation Comprehension"],"prefix":"10.1609","volume":"40","author":[{"given":"Lin","family":"Li","sequence":"first","affiliation":[],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Wei","family":"Chen","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Jiahui","family":"Li","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Kwang-Ting","family":"Cheng","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Long","family":"Chen","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]}],"member":"9382","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2026,3,14]]},"container-title":["Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence"],"original-title":[],"link":[{"URL":"https:\/\/ojs.aaai.org\/index.php\/AAAI\/article\/download\/37557\/41519","content-type":"application\/pdf","content-version":"vor","intended-application":"text-mining"},{"URL":"https:\/\/ojs.aaai.org\/index.php\/AAAI\/article\/download\/37557\/41519","content-type":"unspecified","content-version":"vor","intended-application":"similarity-checking"}],"deposited":{"date-parts":[[2026,3,17]],"date-time":"2026-03-17T23:27:23Z","timestamp":1773790043000},"score":1,"resource":{"primary":{"URL":"https:\/\/ojs.aaai.org\/index.php\/AAAI\/article\/view\/37557"}},"subtitle":[],"short-title":[],"issued":{"date-parts":[[2026,3,14]]},"references-count":0,"journal-issue":{"issue":"8","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2026,3,17]]}},"URL":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1609\/aaai.v40i8.37557","relation":{},"ISSN":["2374-3468","2159-5399"],"issn-type":[{"value":"2374-3468","type":"electronic"},{"value":"2159-5399","type":"print"}],"subject":[],"published":{"date-parts":[[2026,3,14]]}}}