VIRO: Robust and Efficient Neuro-Symbolic Reasoning with Verification for Referring Expression Comprehension

Referring Expression Comprehension (REC) aims to localize the image region corresponding to a natural-language query. Recent neuro-symbolic REC approaches leverage large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (VLMs) to perform compositional reasoning, decomposing queries into structured programs and executing them step-by-step. While such approaches achieve interpretable reasoning and strong zero-shot generalization, they assume that intermediate reasoning steps are accurate.However, this assumption causes cascading errors: false detections and invalid relations propagate through the reasoning chain, yielding high-confidence false positives even when no target is present in the image. To address this limitation, we introduce Verification-Integrated Reasoning Operators (VIRO), a neuro-symbolic framework that embeds lightweight operator-level verifiers within reasoning steps.Each operator executes and validates its output, such as object existence or spatial relationship, thereby allowing the system to robustly handle no-target cases when verification conditions are not met.Our framework achieves state-of-the-art performance, reaching 61.1\% balanced accuracy across target-present and no-target settings, and demonstrates generalization to real-world egocentric data. Furthermore, VIRO shows superior computational efficiency in terms of throughput, high reliability with a program failure rate of less than 0.3\%, and scalability through decoupled program generation from execution.