arXiv Computer Vision

PixFoundation: Are We Heading in the Right Direction with Pixel-level Vision Foundation Models?

arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 15

Pix2Fact: When Vision Is Not Enough -- Benchmarking Fine-Grained VQA with Web Verification on High-Resolution Real-World Scenes

arXiv:2602. 00593v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Despite progress on general tasks, vision-language models (VLMs) still struggle with challenges that demand both fine-grained visual grounding and external knowledge, a synergy overlooked by existing benchmarks that evaluate these abilities in isolation.

By Yifan Jiang, Cong Zhang, Bofei Zhang, Qiaofeng Zheng, Yifan Yang, Bingzhang Wang, Yew-Soon Ong
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 17

PANORAMA: Panoptic Grounded Captioning via Mask Proposal Selection

PANORAMA introduces a new panoptic grounded captioning framework that jointly generates detailed image captions and associates each phrase with precise pixel-level masks. The authors create PanoCaps, a human‑annotated benchmark with dense captions and near‑complete pixel coverage, and propose a phrase‑mask matching protocol with a generalized Panoptic Quality metric. PANORAMA conditions a pretrained segmenter on contextualized phrase representations, learns to select appropriate masks, and achieves state‑of‑the‑art grounding performance on PanoCaps and other pixel‑level tasks.

By Sara Pieri, Evangelos Kazakos, Shizhe Chen, Josef Sivic, Cordelia Schmid
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 23

CRAG-MM-Diagnostics: Enabling Stage-Wise Analysis of Knowledge-Intensive VQA

Knowledge-Intensive Visual Question Answering (KI-VQA) benchmarks evaluate Vision-Language Models (VLMs) as multimodal knowledge assistants by requiring external information beyond a provided image to answer questions. KI-VQA involves multiple sub-problems -referring expression understanding, visual grounding, object recognition, knowledge retrieval, and reasoning-yet existing benchmarks typically report only end-task accuracy, obscuring where failures arise.

arXiv Computer Vision
Oct 9

From What to Which: Decoding Modifier Grounding in Frozen MLLMs

The paper investigates whether frozen Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) encode grounding information about specific visual instances within the tokens they generate, including modifiers such as attributes, spatial expressions, and relational terms. The authors introduce OTTER, a lightweight supervised probe that applies Optimal Transport to align generated tokens with visual regions, producing compact grounding maps. Experiments demonstrate that modifier tokens, especially spatial terms, carry instance‑discriminative visual information, that object nouns also encode referential cues, and that the recovered grounding remains robust to context changes and generalizes to free generation and cross‑dataset transfer.

By Barbara Toniella Corradini (AI for Good), Caterina Gallegati (University of Siena, Italy), Ludovica Genovese (AI for Good), Vittorio Murino (AI for Good)
arXiv AI
Aug 26

When Seeing Is Not Enough: Benchmarking Interactive Visual Grounding in LVLMs

The paper introduces a controlled evaluation framework for interactive visual grounding in large vision-language models (LVLMs), examining how varying amounts of initial target information and dialogue affect performance. Experiments across four visual contexts and interaction protocols show that current LVLMs lag behind human baselines, especially when no initial description is given and information must be gathered through questions. The study also finds that LVLMs are poorly calibrated, often overestimating confidence, and that interactive grounding remains a significant challenge requiring visual matching, information seeking, and synthesis.

By Zhengxiang Wang, Owen Rambow