DiVE-k: Differential Visual Reasoning for Fine-grained Image Recognition

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Kumar, Raja, Sadhu, Arka, Nevatia, Ram
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Kumar, Raja
Sadhu, Arka
Nevatia, Ram
author_facet Kumar, Raja
Sadhu, Arka
Nevatia, Ram
contents Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs) possess extensive text knowledge but struggles to utilize this knowledge for fine-grained image recognition, often failing to differentiate between visually similar categories. Existing fine-tuning methods using Reinforcement Learning (RL) with exact-match reward signals are often brittle, encourage memorization of training categories, and fail to elicit differential reasoning needed for generalization to unseen classes. To address this, we propose $\textbf{DiVE-k}$, $\textbf{Di}$fferential $\textbf{V}$isual r$\textbf{E}$asoning using top-$\textbf{k}$ generations, framework that leverages model's own top-k predictions as a training signal. For each training image, DiVE-k creates a multiple-choice question from the model's top-k outputs and uses RL to train the model to select the correct answer. This approach requires the model to perform fine-grained differential reasoning among plausible options and provides a simple, verifiable reward signal that mitigates memorization and improves generalization. Experiments on five standard fine-grained datasets show that our method significantly outperforms existing approaches. In the standard base-to-novel generalization setting, DiVE-k surpasses the QWEN2.5-VL-7B and ViRFT by 10.04% and 6.16% on the Harmonic Mean metric, respectively. Further experiments show similar gains in mixed-domain and few-shot scenarios. Our code is available $\href{https://github.com/raja-kumar/DiVE-k}{here}$
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_18305
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle DiVE-k: Differential Visual Reasoning for Fine-grained Image Recognition
Kumar, Raja
Sadhu, Arka
Nevatia, Ram
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs) possess extensive text knowledge but struggles to utilize this knowledge for fine-grained image recognition, often failing to differentiate between visually similar categories. Existing fine-tuning methods using Reinforcement Learning (RL) with exact-match reward signals are often brittle, encourage memorization of training categories, and fail to elicit differential reasoning needed for generalization to unseen classes. To address this, we propose $\textbf{DiVE-k}$, $\textbf{Di}$fferential $\textbf{V}$isual r$\textbf{E}$asoning using top-$\textbf{k}$ generations, framework that leverages model's own top-k predictions as a training signal. For each training image, DiVE-k creates a multiple-choice question from the model's top-k outputs and uses RL to train the model to select the correct answer. This approach requires the model to perform fine-grained differential reasoning among plausible options and provides a simple, verifiable reward signal that mitigates memorization and improves generalization. Experiments on five standard fine-grained datasets show that our method significantly outperforms existing approaches. In the standard base-to-novel generalization setting, DiVE-k surpasses the QWEN2.5-VL-7B and ViRFT by 10.04% and 6.16% on the Harmonic Mean metric, respectively. Further experiments show similar gains in mixed-domain and few-shot scenarios. Our code is available $\href{https://github.com/raja-kumar/DiVE-k}{here}$
title DiVE-k: Differential Visual Reasoning for Fine-grained Image Recognition
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.18305