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...
arXiv:2608. 06236v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Our primary objective is to advance video object counting in crowded scenes, aiming to robustly count all instances of a target category based on given text or visual prompts.
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.
The paper introduces Group-Individual Object Counting (GIC), a new task that requires models to count both individual objects and higher‑level semantic groups within the same image. To support this, the authors present BunchCount, a benchmark of 1,330 images with 89,254 individual and 11,065 group annotations that include explicit containment relations. Experiments show that existing counting models excel at individual counting but struggle with group counting, leading the authors to propose a relational counting framework that leverages group‑individual containment to improve group‑level accuracy while preserving individual performance.
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.
ABACUS is a 3‑billion‑parameter vision‑language model that simultaneously tackles object counting, crowd counting, referring‑expression counting, and count‑faithful image generation. It introduces density‑aware adaptive zooming with an objectness map, a boundary‑aware count policy trained via GRPO to avoid over‑ or under‑counting at crop edges, and a cycle‑consistent GRPO strategy that scores generated images for count accuracy and aesthetic quality without external critics. The model sets new state‑of‑the‑art performance on seven benchmarks, outperforming both specialized and larger generalist models.
Object-counting methods have rapidly shifted from class-specific density regression to open-vocabulary, foundation-model-backed counters. These methods now enumerate instances from various visual and...
NumBench is a large benchmark of 640,000 text‑to‑image prompts that tests how well models count objects, covering 1,600 categories and counts from 1 to 100. It uses a factorial design to vary composition, spatial guidance, and appearance while balancing counts, and introduces a process model that predicts a near‑quadratic collision deficit at low occupancy. The authors also propose the Confidence‑Weighted Numeric Precision Score for scalable evaluation and find that all tested systems perform poorly above 50 objects, with count range, layout, and composition having the largest effects.
The paper presents a generative framework that estimates category-level 6D pose and 3D size of objects from a single RGB image, using score-based diffusion models to produce a multi-hypothesis pose distribution. It replaces costly likelihood pruning with a Mean Shift approach to isolate the mode as the final pose estimate, achieving state-of-the-art results on the REAL275 benchmark. The method also decouples detection from pose estimation, enabling robust zero-shot generalisation on the Wild6D dataset and extending naturally to video sequences by propagating the pose distribution over time.
Automated crowd counting in Hajj video is difficult not because current models lack capacity, but because the footage violates the assumptions those models were built on: cameras observe the crowd from steep, near-vertical angles, individuals occlude one another extensively, and a single frame can contain well over a thousand people. Benchmarks that test crowd counting in such an environment are either private or not detailed per second.
arXiv:2606. 01710v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language models (VLMs), such as CLIP, achieve powerful zero-shot classification.
Background-Free Objectness Learning (B-FOR) is a dense, class‑agnostic detection framework that learns objectness without treating unlabeled regions as background. It predicts multi‑scale object‑center and scale fields, using spatially structured soft targets to supervise only reliable annotated areas and introduces displacement‑aware scale fields to model object extent. Experiments on PASCAL VOC, MS‑COCO, and Open Images show B‑FOR improves recall by over +10 AR points compared to prior class‑agnostic baselines, with ablation studies confirming the importance of localized supervision and displacement‑aware scaling.