# Align and Surpass Human Camouflaged Perception: Visual Refocus Reinforcement Fine-Tuning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.19611 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.19611/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 25 of its 33 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 May 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 25 of 25)

- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03300/) (2024)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12948/) (2025)
- [Qwen2.5-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13923/) (2025)
- [Flamingo: a Visual Language Model for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.14198/) (2022)
- [Qwen2-VL: Enhancing Vision-Language Model's Perception of the World at Any Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12191/) (2024)
- [InstructBLIP: Towards General-purpose Vision-Language Models with Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06500/) (2023)
- [LLaVA-OneVision: Easy Visual Task Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03326/) (2024)
- [Expanding Performance Boundaries of Open-Source Multimodal Models with Model, Data, and Test-Time Scaling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.05271/) (2024)
- [How Far Are We to GPT-4V? Closing the Gap to Commercial Multimodal Models with Open-Source Suites](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16821/) (2024)
- [Visual-RFT: Visual Reinforcement Fine-Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.01785/) (2025)
- [R1-Onevision: Advancing Generalized Multimodal Reasoning through Cross-Modal Formalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.10615/) (2025)
- [R1-VL: Learning to Reason with Multimodal Large Language Models via Step-wise Group Relative Policy Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.12937/) (2025)
- [LMM-R1: Empowering 3B LMMs with Strong Reasoning Abilities Through Two-Stage Rule-Based RL](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.07536/) (2025)
- [Seg-Zero: Reasoning-Chain Guided Segmentation via Cognitive Reinforcement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.06520/) (2025)
- [Anabranch Network for Camouflaged Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.09451/) (2021)
- [Concealed Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.10274/) (2021)
- [Simultaneously Localize, Segment and Rank the Camouflaged Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.04011/) (2021)
- [R1-Zero's "Aha Moment" in Visual Reasoning on a 2B Non-SFT Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.05132/) (2025)
- [High-resolution Iterative Feedback Network for Camouflaged Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11624/) (2022)
- [Boosting the Generalization and Reasoning of Vision Language Models with Curriculum Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.07065/) (2025)
- [Vision-R1: Evolving Human-Free Alignment in Large Vision-Language Models via Vision-Guided Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.18013/) (2025)
- [Virgo: A Preliminary Exploration on Reproducing o1-like MLLM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.01904/) (2025)
- [Chain of Visual Perception: Harnessing Multimodal Large Language Models for Zero-shot Camouflaged Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.11273/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [VisMem: Latent Vision Memory Unlocks Potential of Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.11007/) (2025)
- [OracleFusion: Assisting the Decipherment of Oracle Bone Script with Structurally Constrained Semantic Typography](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.21101/) (2025)
- [SPEGNet: Synergistic Perception-Guided Network for Camouflaged Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.04472/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Current multi-modal models exhibit a notable misalignment with the human visual system when identifying objects that are visually assimilated into the background. Our observations reveal that these multi-modal models cannot distinguish concealed objects, demonstrating an inability to emulate human cognitive processes which effectively utilize foreground-background similarity principles for visual analysis. To analyze this hidden human-model visual thinking discrepancy, we build a visual system that mimicks human visual camouflaged perception to progressively and iteratively `refocus' visual concealed content. The refocus is a progressive guidance mechanism enabling models to logically localize objects in visual images through stepwise reasoning. The localization process of concealed objects requires hierarchical attention shifting with dynamic adjustment and refinement of prior cognitive knowledge. In this paper, we propose a visual refocus reinforcement framework via the policy optimization algorithm to encourage multi-modal models to think and refocus more before answering, and achieve excellent reasoning abilities to align and even surpass human camouflaged perception systems. Our extensive experiments on camouflaged perception successfully demonstrate the emergence of refocus visual phenomena, characterized by multiple reasoning tokens and dynamic adjustment of the detection box. Besides, experimental results on both camouflaged object classification and detection tasks exhibit significantly superior performance compared to Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) baselines.
