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This study investigates the effectiveness of label-free precision refinement (LFPR) in enhancing the accuracy of vision-language models by allowing them to refine their bounding box predictions without requiring target annotations during inference. By routing predicted regions to a higher-resolution pass and applying geometric constraints, LFPR significantly improves mean accuracy and intersection over union (IoU) metrics across multiple datasets, including Ref-L4 and Flickr30K Entities. The findings reveal that while referent selection and boundary precision can be optimized separately, the geometric guards employed are crucial for maintaining performance, highlighting a nuanced relationship between these components on the IoU curve.
LFPR boosts bounding box accuracy by over 3% on average without any target annotations, revealing a complex interplay between referent selection and boundary precision.
Vision--language models can identify the correct referent while returning an imprecise bounding box. We study whether a frozen direct-answer model can use its own prediction to allocate one additional localized observation without accessing target annotations at inference. Label-free precision refinement (LFPR) routes predicted-small regions to a higher-resolution pass, re-grounds the expression inside a context crop, admits a candidate only under fixed geometric guards, and returns a fixed coordinate-wise midpoint. We report results across three evidence tiers. On 31,921 retrospective Ref-L4 expressions, LFPR raises mAcc$_{0.5:0.95}$ from 72.947\% to 76.013\% (Acc@0.5 88.531\%$\to$89.725\%, Acc@0.9 55.788\%$\to$61.142\%). A frozen transfer to 30,969 RefCOCO/RefCOCO+/RefCOCOg expressions improves every dataset at Acc@0.5, mAcc, and mean IoU (pooled mAcc $+0.645$, Acc@0.5 $+0.817$), while Acc@0.9 is unchanged overall: routing alone gains $+1.162$ points there, but crop, guards, and fusion give back $-1.192$, offsetting rather than showing no strict-IoU effect. A prospective, image-disjoint Flickr30K Entities evaluation improves every endpoint (mAcc $+0.973$, Acc@0.9 $+1.022$), more strongly under a single-box variant (mAcc $+2.575$, Acc@0.9 $+3.689$). The same operator applied to two released grounding specialists improves every endpoint (Acc@0.9 $+1.569$/$+6.716$ for EGM-4B/8B) at roughly twice the latency, composing with specialist training rather than replacing it. A genuine unguarded control (guard removed from the same candidates) underperforms the incumbent on every metric, showing the guard is load-bearing. Together, these results show that referent selection and boundary precision are partially separable, with different components moving opposing regions of the IoU curve -- behavior a single threshold cannot reveal.
