A poor start lowers the ceiling, but does not negate the value of finishing well. In autoregressive video temporal grounding, models systematically exhibit an endpoint performance asymmetry, predicting ends significantly worse than starts. A committed flawed start acts as an immutable physical constraint, irreversibly capping the attainable overlap as a sunk loss. While models should minimize the remaining conditional regret, standard post-training paradigms fail to teach this adaptation. Specifically, teacher-forced SFT suffers from strict prefix exposure bias, and holistic trajectory evaluation in standard GRPO inadvertently penalizes conditionally optimal ends if they follow a poor start. To address this, we introduce FinishStrong, a novel two-stage post-training framework explicitly designed to teach optimal continuations. First, Online-start SFT exposes the end prediction to the model's own generated contexts. Second, Conditional-tree GRPO restructures the sampling topology, centering end rewards exclusively within the same-start branch to mathematically isolate the conditional end quality from the inherited start penalty. FinishStrong-9B achieves a state-of-the-art 61.7\% overall IoU on TimeLens-Bench, remarkably outperforming flagship closed-source models like Gemini-3.8-Flash and Qwen3.8-Max. Crucially, when forced to continue from imperfect starts, it reduces the subsequent end prediction error by 36.5\%, proving its exceptional ability to end well after flawed starts. Code will be open.
Zhiqiang Wu, Shuang Sun, Jiale Zhang, Jing Li, Yibo Chen, Xu Tang, Yao Hu
Multi-image composition (MICo) is a critical yet challenging capability for large-scale image editing models, where consistency degrades rapidly as the number of reference images increases. While supervised fine-tuning (SFT) can equip models with basic MICo ability, it provides only implicit supervision on the composed image and often fails to learn reliable object-level correspondence across multiple references. We propose DeCoRL, a reinforcement-learning (RL) framework that improves MICo consistency by decomposing holistic MICo consistency into object-level consistency. DeCoRL first establishes instruction-relevant object correspondences across reference images and localizes the corresponding regions in the generated image. It then uses a VLM-based reward model trained on single-object consistency annotations to produce fine-grained, object-wise feedback, which is aggregated into a multi-object consistency reward to guide RL post-training. We further introduce DeCo-Bench, a benchmark covering compositions from 2 to 6 reference images. Experiments on DeCo-Bench and the public MICo-Bench demonstrate consistent improvements in MICo consistency.