The paper reviews the evolution of object‑counting techniques from class‑specific density regression to open‑vocabulary, foundation‑model‑backed counters that can handle visual and textual prompts. It highlights that current evaluation relies on a few saturated benchmarks, leading to models exploiting statistical regularities rather than true generalization. The authors propose a five‑axis taxonomy and audit the literature across domains such as microscopy, remote sensing, crowd counting, and agriculture, identifying six structural contradictions and outlining a roadmap for robust, multimodal evaluation protocols.
By Joana Konadu Owusu, Shivanand Venkanna Sheshappanavar
arXiv:2607. 06420v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Visual counting is a fundamental pillar of multimodal intelligence, requiring a seamless integration of fine-grained grounding and spatial reasoning.
By Jinhong Deng, Limeng Qiao, Guanglu Wan
arXiv:2605.25784v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have advanced rapidly in remote-sensing analysis, yet existing evaluations remain predominantly 2D-centric...
By Jing Huang, Duanchu Wang, Junjie Yang, Zihang Cheng, Cheng Li, Lin Cui, Zhouyi Wu, Di Wang
ABACUS is a unified vision-language model that handles object counting, crowd counting, referring-expression counting, and count-faithful image generation without any benchmark-specific training required. Our model is built on existing 3B-parameter unified foundation model and is adapted for object localization tasks using three key innovations: density-aware adaptive zooming with objectness maps for spatial grounding; a boundary-aware count policy via GRPO to eliminate crop-boundary errors; and a cycle-consistent GRPO strategy where the understanding branch self-critiques generated outputs, closing the understanding-generation gap without any external annotations.
arXiv:2608.20621v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Text-guided zero-shot object counters excel at spatial localization but categorize poorly on novel or fine-grained classes: natural language is too coa...
By Adriano D'Alessandro, Ali Mahdavi-Amiri, Ghassan Hamarneh
arXiv:2512. 23020v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: 3D visual grounding aims to locate objects based on natural language descriptions in 3D scenes.
By Wenyuan Huang, Zhenyu Zhang, Zhao Wang, Zhou Wei, Ting Huang, Fang Zhao, Jian Yang
arXiv:2601. 06550v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Semantic Multi-Object Tracking (SMOT) is evolving from purely geometric localization toward comprehensive video understanding.
By Pan Liao, Feng Yang, Di Wu, Jinwen Yu, Wang Zhao, Dingwen Zhang
arXiv:2605.25706v3 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Referring expression comprehension (REC) aims to localize a target object within an image based on a given expression. Although recent advances in...
By Zongjian Wu, Lei Zhang
The paper introduces CompareBench, a new benchmark suite for evaluating visual comparison reasoning in vision‑language models. It includes TallyBench for object counting, OmniCaps for captioning and tagging, and a 1,200‑question CompareBench that tests quantity, geometric, spatial, and temporal comparisons. Experiments on nine closed‑source models show strong overall performance but persistent weaknesses in counting, spatial reasoning, geometric comparison, and temporal ordering, highlighting visual comparison as a systematic challenge for current VLMs.
By Jie Cai
arXiv:2603. 09731v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are increasingly considered as a foundation for embodied agents, yet it remains unclear whether they can reliably reason about the long-term physical consequences of actions from an egocentric viewpoint.
By Chengjun Yu, Xuhan Zhu, Chaoqun Du, Pengfei Yu, Wei Zhai, Yang Cao, Zheng-Jun Zha
arXiv:2508. 10956v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Inspired by human categorization, visual reasoning about object properties, such as physical attributes and functions, involves identifying and recognizing low-level details and higher-level abstractions.
By Abhishek Kolari, Mohammadhossein Khojasteh, Yifan Jiang, Floris den Hengst, Filip Ilievski
arXiv:2606. 30632v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Can the robot use a plate to cut a cake if no knife is available?
By Yuhong Deng, Yuyao Liu, David Hsu