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Zooming without Zooming: Region-to-Image Distillation for Fine-Grained Multimodal Perception

Lai Wei, Liangbo He, Jun Lan, Lingzhong Dong, Yutong Cai, Siyuan Li, Huijia Zhu, Weiqiang Wang, Linghe Kong, Yue Wang, Zhuosheng Zhang, Weiran Huang · Feb 12, 2026 · Citations: 0

Automatic Metrics Coding Tool Use
Open arXiv Find Implementation RSS feed Shortlist (0)

How to use this page

Moderate trust

Use this for comparison and orientation, not as your only source.

Best use

Background context only

What to verify

Validate the evaluation procedure and quality controls in the full paper before operational use.

Evidence quality

Moderate

Derived from extracted protocol signals and abstract evidence.

Abstract

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) excel at broad visual understanding but still struggle with fine-grained perception, where decisive evidence is small and easily overwhelmed by global context. Recent "Thinking-with-Images" methods alleviate this by iteratively zooming in and out regions of interest during inference, but incur high latency due to repeated tool calls and visual re-encoding. To address this, we propose Region-to-Image Distillation, which transforms zooming from an inference-time tool into a training-time primitive, thereby internalizing the benefits of agentic zooming into a single forward pass of an MLLM. In particular, we first zoom in to micro-cropped regions to let strong teacher models generate high-quality VQA data, and then distill this region-grounded supervision back to the full image. After training on such data, the smaller student model improves "single-glance" fine-grained perception without tool use. To rigorously evaluate this capability, we further present ZoomBench, a hybrid-annotated benchmark of 845 VQA data spanning six fine-grained perceptual dimensions, together with a dual-view protocol that quantifies the global--regional "zooming gap". Experiments show that our models achieve leading performance across multiple fine-grained perception benchmarks, and also improve general multimodal cognition on benchmarks such as visual reasoning and GUI agents. We further discuss when "Thinking-with-Images" is necessary versus when its gains can be distilled into a single forward pass. Our code is available at https://github.com/inclusionAI/Zooming-without-Zooming.

Should You Rely On This Paper?

This paper is adjacent to HFEPX scope and is best used for background context, not as a primary protocol reference.

Best use

Background context only

Use if you need

A secondary eval reference to pair with stronger protocol papers.

Main weakness

No major weakness surfaced.

Trust level

Moderate

Usefulness score

25/100 • Low

Treat as adjacent context, not a core eval-method reference.

Human Feedback Signal

Not explicit in abstract metadata

Evaluation Signal

Detected

Usefulness for eval research

Adjacent candidate

Extraction confidence 55%

If you are doing eval pipeline work, start here:

Human Eval Hub LLM-as-Judge Hub Pairwise Preference Hub Tool-Use Eval Hub

What We Could Verify

These are the protocol signals we could actually recover from the available paper metadata. Use them to decide whether this paper is worth deeper reading.

Human Feedback Types

missing

None explicit

No explicit feedback protocol extracted.

"Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) excel at broad visual understanding but still struggle with fine-grained perception, where decisive evidence is small and easily overwhelmed by global context."

Evaluation Modes

strong

Automatic Metrics

Includes extracted eval setup.

"Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) excel at broad visual understanding but still struggle with fine-grained perception, where decisive evidence is small and easily overwhelmed by global context."

Quality Controls

missing

Not reported

No explicit QC controls found.

"Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) excel at broad visual understanding but still struggle with fine-grained perception, where decisive evidence is small and easily overwhelmed by global context."

Benchmarks / Datasets

strong

Zoombench

Useful for quick benchmark comparison.

"To rigorously evaluate this capability, we further present ZoomBench, a hybrid-annotated benchmark of 845 VQA data spanning six fine-grained perceptual dimensions, together with a dual-view protocol that quantifies the global--regional "zooming gap"."

Reported Metrics

missing

Not extracted

No metric anchors detected.

"Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) excel at broad visual understanding but still struggle with fine-grained perception, where decisive evidence is small and easily overwhelmed by global context."

Human Feedback Details

  • Uses human feedback: No
  • Feedback types: None
  • Rater population: Not reported
  • Expertise required: Coding

Evaluation Details

  • Evaluation modes: Automatic Metrics
  • Agentic eval: Tool Use
  • Quality controls: Not reported
  • Evidence quality: Moderate
  • Use this page as: Background context only

Protocol And Measurement Signals

Benchmarks / Datasets

Zoombench

Reported Metrics

No metric terms were extracted from the available abstract.

Research Brief

Metadata summary

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) excel at broad visual understanding but still struggle with fine-grained perception, where decisive evidence is small and easily overwhelmed by global context.

Based on abstract + metadata only. Check the source paper before making high-confidence protocol decisions.

Key Takeaways

  • Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) excel at broad visual understanding but still struggle with fine-grained perception, where decisive evidence is small and easily overwhelmed by global context.
  • Recent "Thinking-with-Images" methods alleviate this by iteratively zooming in and out regions of interest during inference, but incur high latency due to repeated tool calls and visual re-encoding.
  • To address this, we propose Region-to-Image Distillation, which transforms zooming from an inference-time tool into a training-time primitive, thereby internalizing the benefits of agentic zooming into a single forward pass of an MLLM.

Researcher Actions

  • Compare this paper against nearby papers in the same arXiv category before using it for protocol decisions.
  • Validate inferred eval signals (Tool-use evaluation) against the full paper.
  • Use related-paper links to find stronger protocol-specific references.

Caveats

  • Generated from abstract + metadata only; no PDF parsing.
  • Signals below are heuristic and may miss details reported outside the abstract.

Recommended Queries

Research Summary

Contribution Summary

  • To address this, we propose Region-to-Image Distillation, which transforms zooming from an inference-time tool into a training-time primitive, thereby internalizing the benefits of agentic zooming into a single forward pass of an MLLM.
  • To rigorously evaluate this capability, we further present ZoomBench, a hybrid-annotated benchmark of 845 VQA data spanning six fine-grained perceptual dimensions, together with a dual-view protocol that quantifies the global--regional…
  • Experiments show that our models achieve leading performance across multiple fine-grained perception benchmarks, and also improve general multimodal cognition on benchmarks such as visual reasoning and GUI agents.

Why It Matters For Eval

  • To address this, we propose Region-to-Image Distillation, which transforms zooming from an inference-time tool into a training-time primitive, thereby internalizing the benefits of agentic zooming into a single forward pass of an MLLM.
  • To rigorously evaluate this capability, we further present ZoomBench, a hybrid-annotated benchmark of 845 VQA data spanning six fine-grained perceptual dimensions, together with a dual-view protocol that quantifies the global--regional…

Researcher Checklist

  • Gap: Human feedback protocol is explicit

    No explicit human feedback protocol detected.

  • Pass: Evaluation mode is explicit

    Detected: Automatic Metrics

  • Gap: Quality control reporting appears

    No calibration/adjudication/IAA control explicitly detected.

  • Pass: Benchmark or dataset anchors are present

    Detected: Zoombench

  • Gap: Metric reporting is present

    No metric terms extracted.

Related Papers

Papers are ranked by protocol overlap, extraction signal alignment, and semantic proximity.

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