Understanding how supervision signals shape semantic visual representations remains challenging, particularly in fine-grained, low-data settings. Standard evaluations of vision models rely on downstre...
arXiv:2610.32442v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Fine-grained visual classification (FGVC) requires distinguishing between highly similar categories by focusing on subtle, localized visual differences...
OpenVAM is a new framework for visual attention modeling that combines a dense saliency map with language‑based explanations. It uses a decoupled design: a visual pathway for precise localization and a vision‑language head that generates grounded what/why explanations. The method is trained in three stages to preserve localization while adding language grounding, and a scalable pipeline creates multi‑domain annotations for evaluation.
arXiv:2607. 26107v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Dense vision-language understanding, including object localization, region recognition, and open-vocabulary semantic segmentation, requires associating language concepts with spatially grounded visual regions.
arXiv:2609.13706v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Co-salient object detection (Co-SOD) requires a model to find foreground regions that are salient in individual images and supported by the image group...
arXiv:2610.32220v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Autoregressive vision-language models (VLMs) struggle to ground generated text in the correct image regions, and existing explainability methods, such...
The paper investigates saliency-guided data augmentation for low-resource handwritten character recognition, proposing that saliency maps can be used to design augmentation variants that perturb, preserve, or constrain visually informative regions. It introduces the Explainability Consistency Index (ECI) to measure saliency stability under perturbations and compares classical transformations, random lacunae, and saliency-constrained lacunae. Results show that saliency-constrained augmentation can improve recognition and explanation consistency, but the optimal strategy depends on architecture and corpus, suggesting saliency should be used as a control mechanism rather than a fixed augmentation rule.
The paper introduces Bidirectional Reciprocal Learning (BRL), a parameter‑efficient fine‑tuning framework for referring image segmentation that operates on frozen vision foundation models. BRL employs two lightweight adapters—Reciprocal Attention Adapter (RAA) for token‑level cross‑modal attention and Reciprocal Gate Adapter (RGA) for channel‑level gating—to enable hierarchical, bidirectional information flow between vision and language. Experiments on RefCOCO, RefCOCO+, and RefCOCOg show that BRL outperforms existing methods while updating fewer than 0.5% of backbone parameters.
The paper investigates whether pretrained language models can act as lightweight auxiliary supervision for supervised vision training, without requiring paired image-text data or complex objectives. Two forms of language guidance—Explicit Language Guidance (ExLG) and Implicit Language Guidance (ImLG)—are evaluated across six generalization regimes, including in‑distribution, out‑of‑distribution, shortcut resistance, texture/shape bias, adversarial robustness, and continual learning. Results show that ExLG improves in‑distribution, low‑data performance, and continual learning retention, while ImLG is more effective in shortcut‑sensitive and adversarial settings, and both add minimal parameters and training overhead.
The paper introduces Lens, a training‑free framework that aligns multimodal representations with the semantic perspective required by downstream tasks. Lens uses a task‑specific readout phrase to anchor the perspective and then aggregates token states after the full input, ensuring the extracted representation reflects task‑conditioned evidence integration rather than generic salient content. The method achieves a Precision@1 of 63.9 across 36 MMEB datasets, outperforming the nearest training‑free baseline by 10.2 points.
arXiv:2509.22650v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Most existing approaches to referring segmentation achieve strong performance only through fine-tuning or by composing multiple pre-trained models,...
CARE introduces a constrained attention refinement framework that uses teacher‑student distillation to improve fine‑grained visual classification while maintaining interpretability. The method keeps the final prediction and explanation within a class‑specific attention student, while a training‑only auxiliary teacher reads selected intermediate DINOv2 layers with learnable queries to fuse multi‑level representations and transfer class‑discriminative knowledge. Additional diversity and sparsity regularizers refine the student’s attention heads, reducing redundancy and encouraging compact trait localization, achieving 78.5% Top‑1 accuracy on CUB and demonstrating faithful explanations via insertion and deletion metrics.