Papers › V*: Guided Visual Search as a Core Mechanism in Multimodal LLMs
V*: Guided Visual Search as a Core Mechanism in Multimodal LLMs
Penghao Wu, Saining Xie
When we look around and perform complex tasks, how we see and selectively process what we see is crucial. However, the lack of this visual search mechanism in current multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) hinders their ability to focus on important visual details, especially when handling high-resolution and visually crowded images. To address this, we introduce V*, an LLM-guided visual search mechanism that employs the world knowledge in LLMs for efficient visual querying. When combined with an MLLM, this mechanism enhances collaborative reasoning, contextual understanding, and precise targeting of specific visual elements. This integration results in a new MLLM meta-architecture, named Show, sEArch, and TelL (SEAL). We further create V*Bench, a benchmark specifically designed to evaluate MLLMs in their ability to process high-resolution images and focus on visual details. Our study highlights the necessity of incorporating visual search capabilities into multimodal systems. The code is available https://github.com/penghao-wu/vstar.
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Code
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Code Syntology ran Syntology
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Tasks
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
| Task | Dataset | Model | Metric | Value | Rank at snapshot | Leaderboard | Report |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Visual Question Answering | MM-Vet | SEAL (7B) | GPT-4 score | 27.7 | #217 of 231 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Visual Question Answering | MM-Vet | SEAL (7B) | Params | 7B | #217 of 231 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Visual Question Answering | V*bench | SEAL | Accuracy | 75.39 | #4 of 5 | Archive leaderboard | report |
Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.
Methods
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