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Granulon: Awakening Pixel-Level Visual Encoders with Adaptive Multi-Granularity Semantics for MLLM

arXiv cs.CV / 3/11/2026

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Key Points

  • Granulon is a novel multimodal large language model (MLLM) visual encoder based on DINOv3 that introduces adaptive granularity augmentation to enhance pixel-level to coarse semantic understanding.
  • The model features a text-conditioned granularity Controller that dynamically adjusts the level of visual abstraction depending on the textual input's semantic scope.
  • An Adaptive Token Aggregation module performs granularity-guided pooling and relation-aware clustering to generate compact and semantically rich visual tokens.
  • Granulon enables unified multi-granularity reasoning from pixel to coarse levels in a single forward pass, improving accuracy by approximately 30% and reducing hallucinations by 20% compared to prior visual encoders.
  • Extensive interpretable experiments demonstrate Granulon’s superiority in fine-grained visual understanding and multi-granularity semantic reasoning under identical settings.

Computer Science > Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition

arXiv:2603.08800 (cs)
[Submitted on 9 Mar 2026]

Title:Granulon: Awakening Pixel-Level Visual Encoders with Adaptive Multi-Granularity Semantics for MLLM

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Abstract:Recent advances in multimodal large language models largely rely on CLIP-based visual encoders, which emphasize global semantic alignment but struggle with fine-grained visual understanding. In contrast, DINOv3 provides strong pixel-level perception yet lacks coarse-grained semantic abstraction, leading to limited multi-granularity reasoning. To address this gap, we propose Granulon, a novel DINOv3-based MLLM with adaptive granularity augmentation. Granulon introduces a text-conditioned granularity Controller that dynamically adjusts the visual abstraction level according to the semantic scope of the textual input, and an Adaptive Token Aggregation module that performs granularity-guided pooling and relation-aware clustering to produce compact, semantically rich visual tokens. This design enables unified "pixel-to-fine-to-coarse" reasoning within a single forward pass. Extensive and interpretable experiments demonstrate that Granulon improves accuracy by ~30% and reduces hallucination by ~20%, outperforming all visual encoders under identical settings.
Subjects: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)
Cite as: arXiv:2603.08800 [cs.CV]
  (or arXiv:2603.08800v1 [cs.CV] for this version)
  https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2603.08800
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arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

Submission history

From: Junyuan Mao [view email]
[v1] Mon, 9 Mar 2026 18:02:52 UTC (20,526 KB)
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