VLM-FO1: Bridging the Gap Between High-Level Reasoning and Fine-Grained
  Perception in VLMs
Authors: name: Peng Liu; name: Haozhan Shen; name: Chunxin Fang; name: Zhicheng Sun; name: Jiajia Liao; name: Tiancheng Zhao
Published: 2025-09-30 08:10:56

Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) excel at high-level scene understanding but
falter on fine-grained perception tasks requiring precise localization. This
failure stems from a fundamental mismatch, as generating exact numerical
coordinates is a challenging task for language-centric architectures. In this
paper, we introduce VLM-FO1, a novel framework that overcomes this limitation
by reframing object-centric perception from a brittle coordinate generation
problem into a robust feature retrieval task. Our method operates as a
plug-and-play module that integrates with any pre-trained VLM. It leverages a
Hybrid Fine-grained Region Encoder (HFRE), featuring a dual vision encoder, to
generate powerful region tokens rich in both semantic and spatial detail. A
token-based referencing system then enables the LLM to seamlessly reason about
and ground language in these specific visual regions. Experiments show that
VLM-FO1 achieves state-of-the-art performance across a diverse suite of
benchmarks, demonstrating exceptional capabilities in object grounding, region
generational understanding, and visual region reasoning. Crucially, our
two-stage training strategy ensures that these perception gains are achieved
without compromising the base model's general visual understanding
capabilities. VLM-FO1 establishes an effective and flexible paradigm for
building perception-aware VLMs, bridging the gap between high-level reasoning
and fine-grained visual grounding.