arXiv · 2603.17326
FineViT: Progressively Unlocking Fine-Grained Perception with Dense Recaptions
Abstract
While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have experienced rapid advancements, their visual encoders frequently remain a performance bottleneck. Conventional CLIP-based encoders struggle with dense spatial tasks due to the loss of visual details caused by low-resolution pretraining and the reliance on noisy, coarse web-crawled image-text pairs. To overcome these limitations, we introduce FineViT, a novel vision encoder specifically designed to unlock fine-grained perception. By replacing coarse web data with dense recaptions, we systematically mitigate information loss through a progressive training paradigm.: first, the encoder is trained from scratch at a high native resolution on billions of global recaptioned image-text pairs, establishing a robust, detail rich semantic foundation. Subsequently, we further enhance its local perception through LLM alignment, utilizing our curated FineCap-450M dataset that comprises over $450$ million high quality local captions. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of the progressive strategy. FineViT achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot recognition and retrieval performance, especially in long-context retrieval, and consistently outperforms multimodal visual encoders such as SigLIP2 and Qwen-ViT when integrated into MLLMs. We hope FineViT could serve as a powerful new baseline for fine-grained visual perception.
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Peisen Zhao, Xiaopeng Zhang, Mingxing Xu, Ruoyu Sun, Zewei Du, Dunzheng Wang, Guanghao Zheng, Haohang Xu, Zhibo Zhang, Yuhang Zhang, Yi Ai, Lin Liu, Qi Tian. 2026-03-18. FineViT: Progressively Unlocking Fine-Grained Perception with Dense Recaptions. https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.17326
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