Paper
Seeing as Experts Do: A Knowledge-Augmented Agent for Open-Set Fine-Grained Visual Understanding
Authors
Junhan Chen, Zilu Zhou, Yujun Tong, Dongliang Chang, Yitao Luo, Zhanyu Ma
Abstract
Fine-grained visual understanding is shifting from static classification to knowledge-augmented reasoning, where models must justify as well as recognise. Existing approaches remain limited by closed-set taxonomies and single-label prediction, leading to significant degradation under open-set or context-dependent conditions. We present the Knowledge-Augmented Fine-Grained Reasoning Agent (KFRA), a unified framework that transforms fine-grained perception into evidence-driven reasoning. KFRA operates through a three-stage closed reasoning loop that emulates expert analysis. It first performs open-vocabulary detection and web-scale retrieval to generate category hypotheses. It then conducts discriminative regions localisation by aligning textual knowledge with visual evidence through a global-to-local focusing mechanism. Finally, it integrates all multimodal evidence within a large multimodal model to perform interpretable reasoning. Unlike existing agents that treat retrieval and reasoning as independent processes, KFRA establishes a retrieval-grounding coupling that converts retrieved knowledge into spatially grounded evidence for verification. This design enables factual, interpretable, and task-agnostic reasoning across diverse fine-grained scenarios. To evaluate this capability, we construct FGExpertBench, a benchmark designed to assess reasoning depth and cross-task generalisation across six knowledge dimensions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that KFRA consistently surpasses both standalone large multimodal models and current agent frameworks, achieving up to 19 percent improvement in reasoning accuracy and delivering evidence-grounded interpretability in open-set fine-grained visual understanding.
Metadata
Related papers
Fractal universe and quantum gravity made simple
Fabio Briscese, Gianluca Calcagni • 2026-03-25
POLY-SIM: Polyglot Speaker Identification with Missing Modality Grand Challenge 2026 Evaluation Plan
Marta Moscati, Muhammad Saad Saeed, Marina Zanoni, Mubashir Noman, Rohan Kuma... • 2026-03-25
LensWalk: Agentic Video Understanding by Planning How You See in Videos
Keliang Li, Yansong Li, Hongze Shen, Mengdi Liu, Hong Chang, Shiguang Shan • 2026-03-25
Orientation Reconstruction of Proteins using Coulomb Explosions
Tomas André, Alfredo Bellisario, Nicusor Timneanu, Carl Caleman • 2026-03-25
The role of spatial context and multitask learning in the detection of organic and conventional farming systems based on Sentinel-2 time series
Jan Hemmerling, Marcel Schwieder, Philippe Rufin, Leon-Friedrich Thomas, Mire... • 2026-03-25
Raw Data (Debug)
{
"raw_xml": "<entry>\n <id>http://arxiv.org/abs/2603.03762v1</id>\n <title>Seeing as Experts Do: A Knowledge-Augmented Agent for Open-Set Fine-Grained Visual Understanding</title>\n <updated>2026-03-04T06:18:45Z</updated>\n <link href='https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.03762v1' rel='alternate' type='text/html'/>\n <link href='https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.03762v1' rel='related' title='pdf' type='application/pdf'/>\n <summary>Fine-grained visual understanding is shifting from static classification to knowledge-augmented reasoning, where models must justify as well as recognise. Existing approaches remain limited by closed-set taxonomies and single-label prediction, leading to significant degradation under open-set or context-dependent conditions. We present the Knowledge-Augmented Fine-Grained Reasoning Agent (KFRA), a unified framework that transforms fine-grained perception into evidence-driven reasoning. KFRA operates through a three-stage closed reasoning loop that emulates expert analysis. It first performs open-vocabulary detection and web-scale retrieval to generate category hypotheses. It then conducts discriminative regions localisation by aligning textual knowledge with visual evidence through a global-to-local focusing mechanism. Finally, it integrates all multimodal evidence within a large multimodal model to perform interpretable reasoning. Unlike existing agents that treat retrieval and reasoning as independent processes, KFRA establishes a retrieval-grounding coupling that converts retrieved knowledge into spatially grounded evidence for verification. This design enables factual, interpretable, and task-agnostic reasoning across diverse fine-grained scenarios. To evaluate this capability, we construct FGExpertBench, a benchmark designed to assess reasoning depth and cross-task generalisation across six knowledge dimensions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that KFRA consistently surpasses both standalone large multimodal models and current agent frameworks, achieving up to 19 percent improvement in reasoning accuracy and delivering evidence-grounded interpretability in open-set fine-grained visual understanding.</summary>\n <category scheme='http://arxiv.org/schemas/atom' term='cs.CV'/>\n <published>2026-03-04T06:18:45Z</published>\n <arxiv:primary_category term='cs.CV'/>\n <author>\n <name>Junhan Chen</name>\n </author>\n <author>\n <name>Zilu Zhou</name>\n </author>\n <author>\n <name>Yujun Tong</name>\n </author>\n <author>\n <name>Dongliang Chang</name>\n </author>\n <author>\n <name>Yitao Luo</name>\n </author>\n <author>\n <name>Zhanyu Ma</name>\n </author>\n </entry>"
}