Learning to Zoom Efficiently with a Contrastive Curriculum

Abstract:Using a zoom-in tool is an important foundational part of modern visual agents, because it allows to efficiently handle tasks involving high-resolution images. Most previous methods need an extensive warm-start supervised fine-tuning phase for teaching models zoom-in. We show that this is not necessary by proposing a new intrinsic reward for learning tool use in MLLMs without the need for additional labels or warm-start SFT. Our InfoNCE-style reward uses a curriculum of increasingly hard negative tool calls as a contrastive training signal. Empirical experiments on $V^*$, HRBench and MME-RealWorld show that our approach is competitive while being more efficient. When used as a drop-in replacement for SFT, we even outperform all baselines. To directly measure the zoom-in ability of models, we further introduce the scalable synthetic Muffin&Chihuahua (M&C) dataset. Each image consists of a grid with every cell either showing a muffin or chihuahua. Leveraging the M&C dataset's unique region of interest labels, we find that recall is the metric that most strongly correlates the zoom-in region with final task performance. Our model and code for reproduction is publicly available under this https URL

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Computation and Language (cs.CL)

arXiv:2609.03206 [cs.CV]

(or arXiv:2609.03206v1 [cs.CV] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.03206 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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