Slow Perception: Let's Perceive Geometric Figures Step-by-step

TL;DR

This paper introduces 'slow perception' for geometric figures, guiding models to gradually understand and reconstruct complex shapes step-by-step, improving perception accuracy in visual reasoning tasks.

Contribution

It proposes a novel 'slow perception' framework with perception decomposition and flow stages, mimicking human-like step-by-step geometric understanding for better visual reasoning.

Findings

Slow perception improves geometric figure copying accuracy.

Inference time scales linearly with perception quality.

Step-by-step perception enhances understanding of complex shapes.

Abstract

Recently, "visual o1" began to enter people's vision, with expectations that this slow-thinking design can solve visual reasoning tasks, especially geometric math problems. However, the reality is that current LVLMs (Large Vision Language Models) can hardly even accurately copy a geometric figure, let alone truly understand the complex inherent logic and spatial relationships within geometric shapes. We believe accurate copying (strong perception) is the first step to visual o1. Accordingly, we introduce the concept of "slow perception" (SP), which guides the model to gradually perceive basic point-line combinations, as our humans, reconstruct complex geometric structures progressively. There are two-fold stages in SP: a) perception decomposition. Perception is not instantaneous. In this stage, complex geometric figures are broken down into basic simple units to unify geometry representation. b) perception flow, which acknowledges that accurately tracing a line is not an easy task. This stage aims to avoid "long visual jumps" in regressing line segments by using a proposed "perceptual ruler" to trace each line stroke-by-stroke. Surprisingly, such a human-like perception manner enjoys an inference time scaling law -- the slower, the better. Researchers strive to speed up the model's perception in the past, but we slow it down again, allowing the model to read the image step-by-step and carefully.