Focus, Don't Prune: Identifying Instruction-Relevant Regions for Information-Rich Image Understanding

arXiv cs.CV / 3/25/2026

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Key Points

  • The paper highlights that large vision-language models struggle with computational overhead when handling information-rich images that require generating many visual tokens.
  • It introduces PinPoint, a two-stage framework that first detects instruction-relevant regions and then refines them to capture fine-grained visual features for reasoning.
  • The method relies on an Instruction-Region Alignment component that localizes relevant areas using both the image content and the textual instruction.
  • The authors add new annotations to provide stronger ground-truth supervision for instruction-relevant regions on InfographicVQA, MultiPageDocVQA, and SinglePageDocVQA benchmarks.
  • Experiments indicate PinPoint improves accuracy while reducing computation by minimizing tokens from irrelevant regions.

Abstract

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have shown strong performance across various multimodal tasks by leveraging the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, processing visually complex and information-rich images, such as infographics or document layouts, requires these models to generate a large number of visual tokens, leading to significant computational overhead. To address this, we propose PinPoint, a novel two-stage framework that first identifies instruction-relevant image regions and then refines them to extract fine-grained visual features for improved reasoning and efficiency. Central to our approach is the Instruction-Region Alignment, which localizes relevant regions using both visual input and textual instructions. We further introduce new annotations that provide richer ground-truth supervision for instruction-relevant regions across challenging VQA benchmarks: InfographicVQA, MultiPageDocVQA, and SinglePageDocVQA. Experimental results show that PinPoint not only achieves superior accuracy compared to existing methods but also reduces computational overhead by minimizing irrelevant visual tokens.