arXiv · 2603.17729
SARE: Sample-wise Adaptive Reasoning for Training-free Fine-grained Visual Recognition
Abstract
Recent advances in Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have enabled training-free Fine-Grained Visual Recognition (FGVR). However, effectively exploiting LVLMs for FGVR remains challenging due to the inherent visual ambiguity of subordinate-level categories. Existing methods predominantly adopt either retrieval-oriented or reasoning-oriented paradigms to tackle this challenge, but both are constrained by two fundamental limitations:(1) They apply the same inference pipeline to all samples without accounting for uneven recognition difficulty, thereby leading to suboptimal accuracy and efficiency; (2) The lack of mechanisms to consolidate and reuse error-specific experience causes repeated failures on similar challenging cases. To address these limitations, we propose SARE, a Sample-wise Adaptive textbfREasoning framework for training-free FGVR. Specifically, SARE adopts a cascaded design that combines fast candidate retrieval with fine-grained reasoning, invoking the latter only when necessary. In the reasoning process, SARE incorporates a self-reflective experience mechanism that leverages past failures to provide transferable discriminative guidance during inference, without any parameter updates. Extensive experiments across 14 datasets substantiate that SARE achieves state-of-the-art performance while substantially reducing computational overhead.
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Jingxiao Yang, DaLin He, Miao Pan, Kaixiang Yao, Ge Su, Wenqi Zhang, Yifeng Hu, Tangwei Li, Yuke Li, Xuhong Zhang. 2026-03-18. SARE: Sample-wise Adaptive Reasoning for Training-free Fine-grained Visual Recognition. https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.17729
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