Visual Search

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6 papers in the last four weeks, against 1 the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.

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Human-Like Attention? A Psychophysical Comparison of Visual Search in Humans and MLLMs
Oct 4, 2026Renchi Zhang, Joost C. F. de Winter, Dimitra Dodou +2Multimodal Large Language Models Visual Search
Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands
Recurrent Latent Visual Search for GUI Grounding
Oct 4, 2026Kaiyu Wu, Beichen Zheng, Weiyao Huang +1GUI Grounding Vision-Language Grounding
Sun Yat-sen University
HaPRL: Human-Anchored Process Reinforcement Learning for Visual Search Agent
Sep 29, 2026Zhangquan Chen, Yaoxin Niu, Xiang An +5Human-in-the-Loop Annotation Process Supervision
Tsinghua University · Peng Cheng Laboratory · LMMs-Lab +2
Visual Parallel Search: Learning to Search High-Resolution Images with Parallel Tile Inspection and Adaptive Zoom
Sep 29, 2026Xijia Tao, Yihua Teng, Xinyu Fu +5Visual Question Answering Tool Use in VLMs
The University of Hong Kong · Huawei Research · City University of Hong Kong +1
Graded-Relevance Composed Multimodal Retrieval for E-commerce Visual Search at Scale
Sep 21, 2026Anubhav Gupta, Hrushikesh Mohapatra, Prijith Chandra +6Information Retrieval Visual Search
Walmart Global Tech Bangalore, India · Walmart Global Tech Sunnyvale, United States
RoboFind: Multi-Agent Personalized Object Search for People Who Are Blind or Have Low Vision
Sep 17, 2026Ruiping Liu, Shaofang Quan, Qian Yin +10Assistive Robotics Multi-Agent Systems
The authors are with the Institute for Anthropomatics and Robotics, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Karlsruhe 76131, Germany. · The author is with the School of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics and the National Engineering Research Center of Robot Visual Perception and Control Technology, Hunan University, Changsha 410012, China. · The author is with Mercedes-Benz.
Conditional Visual Evidence Utility: State-Dependent Rank Reversals in Frozen Vision-Language Encoders
Aug 28, 2026Yunxuan Fang, Xinhe WangVision-Language Models Visual Search
Beihang University
Search over the Visual World: Persistent Visual Memory, Layered Indexes, and Source-Grounded Evidence
Aug 8, 2026Sankalp Nagaonkar, Rohit Garg, Ankit Raj +2Multimodal Memory Information Retrieval
VideoDB
SurgNarrator: A Generative Retrieval Framework for Surgical Video Understanding
Aug 5, 2026Yuqing Feng, Jiawei Ma, Kevin Qinghong Lin +6Surgical Video Understanding Generative Retrieval
Department of Computer Science, University of Liverpool, Liverpool L69 3BX, U.K. · Department of Computer Science, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, China · Department of Engineering, University of Oxford, Oxford OX1 3PJ, U.K. +2
StyleForge: Indoor Furniture Styling by Counterfactual Reasoning in a Hypergraph Field
Aug 3, 2026Lingwei Dang, Shishuo Shang, Pan Liu +9Visual Search
School of Software Engineering, South China University of Technology · School of Information Science and Technology, ShanghaiTech University
Bridging the Catalog-to-Real Gap: Scalable Product Recognition via Multi-Stage Contrastive Learning
Jul 10, 2026Anyi Zhang, Joy Mazumder, Kiril LomakinContrastive Learning Visual Search
Walmart Global Tech Sunnyvale, CA, USA
BVS: Bayesian Visual Search with Multimodal Large Language Model for Fine-grained Perception
Jul 3, 2026Geng Li, Yuxin PengLarge Vision-Language Models Visual Search
Wangxuan Institute of Computer Technology, Peking University
Seek to Segment: Active Perception for Panoramic Referring Segmentation
Jul 2, 2026Song Tang, Shuming Hu, Xincheng Shuai +2Active Perception Referring Image Segmentation
Fudan University, China
PixelEyes: Decoupling Perception and Reasoning for Pinpoint Visual Evidence Seeking
Jun 30, 2026Dengxian Gong, Yuanzheng Wu, Haobo Yuan +11Vision-Language Grounding Tool-Using Vision-Language Agents
Wuhan University · UC Merced · UTS +3
Do vision-language models search like humans? Reasoning tokens as a reaction-time analog in classic visual-search paradigms
Jun 23, 2026Farahnaz WickVLM Evaluation Vision-Language Models
1Independent Researcher
ActiveScope: Actively Seeking and Correcting Perception for MLLMs
Jun 23, 2026Yajing Wang, Chao Bi, Junshu Sun +4Multimodal Large Language Models Vision-Language Grounding
University of Chinese Academy of Sciences · State Key Lab of AI Safety, Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China. · Harbin Institute of Technology (Weihai).
Show, Don't Ask: Generative Visual Disambiguation for Composed Image Retrieval with Turn-Valid Coverage
Jun 17, 2026Amsisan Tran, Baogh Le, Tuan Kiet Pham +1Conformal Prediction Visual Search
[cs.CV]
Visual-Seeker: Towards Visual-Native Multimodal Agentic Search via Active Visual Reasoning
Jun 13, 2026Zhengbo Zhang, Changtao Miao, Jinbo Su +10Multimodal IR Multimodal Grounding
School of Artificial Intelligence, UCAS · Institute of Automation, CAS · Ant Digital Technologies, Ant Group +2
VistaHop: Benchmarking Multi-hop Visual Reasoning for Visual DeepSearch
Jun 2, 2026Hang He, Chuhuai Yue, Chengqi Dong +6VLM Evaluation Visual Question Answering
1East China Normal University · 2Meituan · 3Shanghai Innovation Institute
Self-Prophetic Decoding to Unlock Visual Search in LVLMs
May 27, 2026Zhendong He, Qiyuan Dai, Guanbin Li +2Large Vision-Language Models VLM Reasoning
School of Computer Science and Engineering, Sun Yat-sen University · ShanghaiTech University
VisualNeedle: Benchmarking Active Visual Search in Information-Dense Scenes
May 25, 2026Jingru Chen, Yiming Liu, Mingtao Chen +5VLM Evaluation Tool Use in VLMs
Hunyuan, Tencent · Peking University · Zhejiang University
Binding Visual Features Point by Point
May 25, 2026Udith Haputhanthri, Declan Campbell, Rim Assouel +2Vision-Language Models VLM Interpretability
Princeton University · Mila – Quebec AI Institute · Université de Montréal
CVSearch: Empowering Multimodal LLMs with Cognitive Visual Search for High-Resolution Image Perception
May 22, 2026Liupeng Li, Haoqian Kang, Zhenyu Lu +4Efficient VLM Inference Large Vision-Language Models
Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen, China · Peng Cheng Laboratory, Shenzhen, China · Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenzhen, China.
PathNavigate: A Training-Free Pathology Agent with Surprise-Guided Scan and Shared Slide Memory for Whole-Slide Image VQA
May 22, 2026Chunze Yang, Qidong Liu, Wenjie Zhao +10Healthcare Medical VQA
School of Comp. Science & Technology, Xi’an Jiaotong University · Tencent Jarvis Lab · University of Cambridge
Starve to Perceive: Taming Lazy Perception in VLMs with Constrained Visual Bandwidth
May 18, 2026Yuhuan Wu, Cong Wei, Fangzhen Lin +2Vision-Language Models VLM Adaptation
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology · University of Waterloo
InterLV-Search: Benchmarking Interleaved Multimodal Agentic Search
May 8, 2026Bohan Hou, Jiuning Gu, Jiayan Guo +5Multimodal IR Multimodal Search Agents
Nanyang Technological University · Damo Academy, Alibaba Group · Shandong University +1
Zero-Shot Satellite Image Retrieval through Joint Embeddings: Application to Crisis Response
May 6, 2026James Walsh, William Fawcett, Grace Colverd +1Geospatial Foundation Models Disaster Response
1Trillium Technologies · University of Cambridge · 3Universidad de Antioquia
AutoFocus: Uncertainty-Aware Active Visual Search for GUI Grounding
May 4, 2026Ruilin Yao, Shegnwu Xiong, Tianyu Zou +2Uncertainty Quantification GUI Grounding
Wuhan University of Technology
ProMMSearchAgent: A Generalizable Multimodal Search Agent Trained with Process-Oriented Rewards
Apr 22, 2026Wentao Yan, Shengqin Wang, Huichi Zhou +4Multimodal IR Process Reward Models
East China Normal University · Huawei Noah’s Ark Lab · University College London +2
Training-free Uncertainty Guidance for Complex Visual Tasks with MLLMs
Oct 1, 2025Sanghwan Kim, Rui Xiao, Stephan Alaniz +2Multimodal Large Language Models Long-Video Understanding
1Technical University of Munich · 2Munich Center for Machine Learning · 20263Helmholtz Munich +2

Oct 4, 2026, cs.HCJ/K move · Enter open · S save

Human-Like Attention? A Psychophysical Comparison of Visual Search in Humans and MLLMs

Renchi Zhang, Joost C. F. de Winter, Dimitra Dodou, Harleigh C. Seyffert+1

Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands

Multimodal Large Language Models Visual Search Multimodal Model Evaluation

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Visual search is a fundamental cognitive ability. This study investigates whether Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) exhibit human-like difficulty signatures in visual search tasks. We compared search performance of humans (n = 1,250) and MLLMs using identical 2D and 3D stimuli across different set sizes. Both groups showed efficient performance in feature searches, most clearly when the target had a unique color, but performance degradation in conjunction searches as set sizes increased. Additionally, we found strong correlations between human and MLLM error rates (

ρ= 0.82

), which suggests that MLLMs are sensitive to similar objective complexities, such as stimulus heterogeneity. However, differences were found as well: whereas humans invested extra search time to respond accurately on target-absent trials, MLLMs exhibited extreme present/absent response biases in complex searches. We conclude that MLLMs replicate high-level human performance signatures, yet their underlying computations differ significantly.

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