Video question answering systems built on vision-language models often produce timestamped claims with high confidence even when unsupported by the cited frame. This deceptive hallucination arises because timestamps imply grounding without ensuring correctness, increasing user trust but not accuracy. We introduce a pipeline that closes this loop. A retrieval-augmented language model drafts answers with per-claim timestamp citations, and each cited frame is independently re-examined before being shown to the user. We compare against a plain baseline and ablate three verification designs, evaluated on both Apple Silicon (MLX) and Google Colab (HF Transformers, CUDA). Directly asking the vision model whether a frame supports a claim fails completely (0% catch rate on 40 claims) due to sycophancy. Blind re-captioning plus a general LLM judge improves results but is unstable, oscillating between 0% and 100% flagged depending on prompt phrasing. Replacing that judge with a small natural language inference model yields a stable, interpretable verifier that catches 79% of fabricated claims on adversarial false-premise questions while leaving true claims untouched. We release the full pipeline, evaluation harness, and implementations for both Apple Silicon and Colab. Code is available at https://github.com/yogesh-iitj/grounded-video-qa.
We introduce Self-Verified Reasoner (SVR-R1), a multi-turn RL framework that turns a model's own verification into a learning signal for multimodal reasoning. For each query, the model proposes an answer using the same weights, and issues a binary self-verdict (Yes/No). A 'No' triggers a second-chance rethink; a 'Yes,' or a turn cap, finalizes the output for computing the outcome-based reward. SVR-R1 is implemented with GRPO and an asynchronous multi-turn rollout framework and needs no external supervision or auxiliary critics. We evaluate SVR-R1 on vision-language reasoning benchmarks and show that it improves accuracy by a large margin over strong standard GRPO baselines. Training dynamics show decreasing reliance on verification-fewer verification turns, yet higher test accuracy-indicating that the gap between verification and generation narrows as the policy internalizes self-correction and chooses the most confident answer via our framework. SVR-R1 bridges the less explored intersection of inference-time self-refinement and RL training for VLMs, offering a simple yet effective recipe for bootstrapping multimodal reasoning. We will open-source \textbf{SVR-R1} to facilitate future research in VLMs.