Look Before You Zoom: Adaptive Routing for the Resolution-Context Trade-off in Visual RAG

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) struggles as query-relevant objects become smaller. To address this, recent training-free approaches dynamically retrieve and zoom into local image regions. However, we show that indiscriminately applying retrieval ignores a critical vulnerability: the resolution--context trade-off. Patch-based zooming recovers details for small targets, but can split large objects and destroy global spatial context; attention-based retrieval better preserves large objects, but remains less reliable on tiny details; and global perception is often fastest when retrieval is unnecessary. Motivated by these failure modes, we introduce ViRGo (Visual Retrieval or Global Perception), a lightweight framework that formulates visual retrieval as an adaptive routing problem. ViRGo estimates object scale from the VLM’s intrinsic localization heads during the initial forward pass and combines it with semantic token confidence to select between global perception, patch-based retrieval, and attention-based retrieval with minimal additional computation. Experiments across multiple VQA benchmarks and object-size groups show that ViRGo improves the accuracy–efficiency trade-off: it matches patch retrieval on small details, leverages attention-based retrieval for larger objects, and reduces inference time by routing to the global baseline when zooming is unnecessary.