CoreGaze: Core Subgraph-Driven Visual Gaze Diffusion for Training-Free Referring Multimodal Large Language Models

AbstractReferring multimodal large language models enable users to ground queries to specific image regions via spatial prompts, supporting fine-grained referring dialogue. However, existing methods rely on extensive fine-tuning to mitigate attention distraction, which incurs high computational costs and limits adaptability. Without sufficient training data, irrelevant regions in single images easily divert model focus, leading to redundant outputs or hallucinations. To address this, we propose CoreGaze, a training-free framework that simulates human visual gaze diffusion for fine-grained comprehension. First, CoreGaze constructs a sparse semantic graph from visual tokens, modeling region-wise affinities via thresholded similarity. It then maps the user’s visual prompt to a core subgraph with amplified initial influence, which drives a degree-normalized diffusion process using restart-equipped random walks to propagate relevance to contextual neighborhoods. This process prunes irrelevant tokens while preserving user-indicated targets and semantically linked context, distilling a focused yet comprehensive subgraph. Finally, CoreGaze fuses this subgraph with prompt tokens in the frozen large language model decoder, facilitating fine-grained referring generation. Experimental results show that CoreGaze achieves outstanding performance in multiple referring dialogue tasks, showcasing its effectiveness.