CVSearch: Empowering Multimodal LLMs with Cognitive Visual Search for High-Resolution Image Perception
This work addresses the coverage-efficiency trade-off in visual search for high-resolution image perception, a key bottleneck for multimodal LLMs.
CVSearch introduces a training-free adaptive framework for high-resolution image perception in multimodal LLMs that dynamically switches between expert-assisted and scan-based search strategies, achieving state-of-the-art accuracy on HR benchmarks while improving search efficiency.
High-resolution (HR) image perception presents a key bottleneck for multimodal large language models (MLLMs). While visual search offers a promising solution, existing methods struggle with the trade-off between coverage and efficiency. Visual expert-assisted search is efficient but prone to blind spots when proposals fail, whereas scan-based search guarantees coverage at the cost of computational redundancy and semantic fragmentation. To address this dilemma, we introduce CVSearch, a training-free adaptive framework that dynamically schedules search strategies via an Assess-then-Search workflow. Specifically, CVSearch first invokes expert-assisted search when global information is insufficient, and only triggers a novel semantic-aware scanning mechanism upon failure. Distinct from rigid grid partitioning, this efficient scanning paradigm incorporates Semantic Guided Adaptive Patching to decompose images into semantically consistent regions, effectively mitigating object fragmentation. Furthermore, we devise a Dynamic Bottom-Up Search strategy driven by a Visual Complexity prior to enable efficient and precise iterative exploration of local details. Extensive experiments on HR benchmarks demonstrate that CVSearch achieves state-of-the-art accuracy while substantially improving search efficiency. Code is released at https://github.com/liliupeng28/ICML26-CVSearch.