Finding Needles in Images: Can Multimodal LLMs Locate Fine Details?

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Thakkar, Parth, Agarwal, Ankush, Kasu, Prasad, Bansal, Pulkit, Devaguptapu, Chaitanya
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Thakkar, Parth
Agarwal, Ankush
Kasu, Prasad
Bansal, Pulkit
Devaguptapu, Chaitanya
author_facet Thakkar, Parth
Agarwal, Ankush
Kasu, Prasad
Bansal, Pulkit
Devaguptapu, Chaitanya
contents While Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown impressive capabilities in document understanding tasks, their ability to locate and reason about fine-grained details within complex documents remains understudied. Consider searching a restaurant menu for a specific nutritional detail or identifying a disclaimer in a lengthy newspaper article tasks that demand careful attention to small but significant details within a broader narrative, akin to Finding Needles in Images (NiM). To address this gap, we introduce NiM, a carefully curated benchmark spanning diverse real-world documents including newspapers, menus, and lecture images, specifically designed to evaluate MLLMs' capability in these intricate tasks. Building on this, we further propose Spot-IT, a simple yet effective approach that enhances MLLMs capability through intelligent patch selection and Gaussian attention, motivated from how humans zoom and focus when searching documents. Our extensive experiments reveal both the capabilities and limitations of current MLLMs in handling fine-grained document understanding tasks, while demonstrating the effectiveness of our approach. Spot-IT achieves significant improvements over baseline methods, particularly in scenarios requiring precise detail extraction from complex layouts.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_05053
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Finding Needles in Images: Can Multimodal LLMs Locate Fine Details?
Thakkar, Parth
Agarwal, Ankush
Kasu, Prasad
Bansal, Pulkit
Devaguptapu, Chaitanya
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
While Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown impressive capabilities in document understanding tasks, their ability to locate and reason about fine-grained details within complex documents remains understudied. Consider searching a restaurant menu for a specific nutritional detail or identifying a disclaimer in a lengthy newspaper article tasks that demand careful attention to small but significant details within a broader narrative, akin to Finding Needles in Images (NiM). To address this gap, we introduce NiM, a carefully curated benchmark spanning diverse real-world documents including newspapers, menus, and lecture images, specifically designed to evaluate MLLMs' capability in these intricate tasks. Building on this, we further propose Spot-IT, a simple yet effective approach that enhances MLLMs capability through intelligent patch selection and Gaussian attention, motivated from how humans zoom and focus when searching documents. Our extensive experiments reveal both the capabilities and limitations of current MLLMs in handling fine-grained document understanding tasks, while demonstrating the effectiveness of our approach. Spot-IT achieves significant improvements over baseline methods, particularly in scenarios requiring precise detail extraction from complex layouts.
title Finding Needles in Images: Can Multimodal LLMs Locate Fine Details?
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.05053