DeepPerception: Advancing R1-like Cognitive Visual Perception in MLLMs
  for Knowledge-Intensive Visual Grounding
Authors: name: Xinyu Ma; name: Ziyang Ding; name: Zhicong Luo; name: Chi Chen; name: Zonghao Guo; name: Derek F. Wong; name: Xiaoyi Feng; name: Maosong Sun
Published: 2025-03-17 04:06:34

Abstract: Human experts excel at fine-grained visual discrimination by leveraging
domain knowledge to refine perceptual features, a capability that remains
underdeveloped in current Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). Despite
possessing vast expert-level knowledge, MLLMs struggle to integrate reasoning
into visual perception, often generating direct responses without deeper
analysis. To bridge this gap, we introduce knowledge-intensive visual grounding
(KVG), a novel visual grounding task that requires both fine-grained perception
and domain-specific knowledge integration. To address the challenges of KVG, we
propose DeepPerception, an MLLM enhanced with cognitive visual perception
capabilities. Our approach consists of (1) an automated data synthesis pipeline
that generates high-quality, knowledge-aligned training samples, and (2) a
two-stage training framework combining supervised fine-tuning for cognitive
reasoning scaffolding and reinforcement learning to optimize
perception-cognition synergy. To benchmark performance, we introduce KVG-Bench
a comprehensive dataset spanning 10 domains with 1.3K manually curated test
cases. Experimental results demonstrate that DeepPerception significantly
outperforms direct fine-tuning, achieving +8.08\% accuracy improvements on
KVG-Bench and exhibiting +4.60\% superior cross-domain generalization over
baseline approaches. Our findings highlight the importance of integrating
cognitive processes into MLLMs for human-like visual perception and open new
directions for multimodal reasoning research. The data, codes, and models are
released at https://github.com/thunlp/DeepPerception.