This work addresses the challenge of open-vocabulary instance segmentation (OVIS) and open-set panoptic segmentation (OSPS), which aim to recognize both predefined and unseen object categories without exhaustive human annotations. Existing methods often suffer from noisy pseudo-masks, limited visual-textual grounding, and difficulty handling synonyms or out-of-vocabulary (OOV) words.
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
Intelligent systems that act in the world require image understanding that is both comprehensive and spatially grounded. Current vision-language models (VLMs) can generate fluent and detailed image ca...
arXiv:2608. 07886v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language grounding connects language to visual content, yet most existing formulations reduce grounding to a unidirectional localization problem: given a prespecified text phrase or category name, identify the corresponding image region.
By Jieyu Zhang, Ziqi Gao, Luke Zettlemoyer, Ranjay Krishna
arXiv:2607. 11008v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Open-vocabulary dense perception (OVDP) aims to localize objects unseen during training by leveraging textual knowledge.
By Mingjie Xie, Guangjun He, Dongli Xu, Youtian Lin, Hongjue Li, Pengming Feng, Jian Guan, Yue Deng
arXiv:2608.30621v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Collecting natural-language referring expressions along with region annotations, such as masks or boxes, is a major bottleneck in visual grounding (V...
By Junbeom Hong, Seonghoon Yu, Hyung Rok Jung, Sundong Kim, Jeany Son
arXiv:2511. 01390v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Fine-grained cross-modal alignment aims to establish precise local correspondences between vision and language, forming a cornerstone for visual question answering and related multimodal applications.
By Xinyu Mao, Junsi Li, Haoji Zhang, Yu Liang, Ming Sun
arXiv:2606. 17950v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Visual information helps resolve ambiguity in coreference resolution, leading to notable performance gains.
By Jinghan Wu, Jing Li, Ivor W. Tsang, Xuetao Zhang
The paper introduces Text-to-Seed (T2S), a training‑free framework for open‑vocabulary semantic segmentation that repurposes Stable Diffusion to generate attention‑based seed points from text queries. These sparse seeds serve as point prompts for the Segment Anything Model (SAM), enabling reliable region expansion without relying on inaccurate coarse masks. T2S achieves strong performance on standard OVSS benchmarks using only the text‑to‑region correspondence of diffusion models and no task‑specific training or extra annotations.
By Kumju Jo, Heesun Jung, Sungyong Baik
Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) has been shown to have limitations in its fine-grained dense feature representation, due to its pre-training focusing on matching the whole image to a text description. Considering the large data and computational burden in pre-training a vision-language model from scratch, a series of works aim to enhance the fine-grained ability of CLIP through a fine-tuning scheme.
ViCo-SAM3 introduces a Vision-Conditioned alignment framework for open-vocabulary camouflaged object segmentation. The approach adds a vision-conditioned (ViCo) module that dynamically adjusts text embeddings based on global visual context, and a vision-conditioned cross-modal binding (ViCoBind) module to improve interaction between visual and textual representations. These innovations close the semantic gap between text and pixel-level cues, enabling state‑of‑the‑art performance on the OVCamo benchmark without heavy parameter overhead.
By Qiangqiang Zhou, Wenjun Tang, Yong Chen, Dandan Zhu, Jiawei Xu
The paper introduces VPRef, the first cross‑domain benchmark for Referring Remote Sensing Image Segmentation, containing 46,972 language‑image‑annotation triplets with a three‑tier linguistic hierarchy. It proposes a parameter‑efficient adaptation method based on the Segment Anything Model and Low‑Rank Adaptation, using pseudo‑label self‑training for visual drift and random multi‑granularity prompt mixing for textual drift. Experiments show the approach improves cross‑domain segmentation while altering only 1.08 % of the base model’s parameters, offering a strong baseline for future research.
By Quanwei Liu, Tao Huang, Jiaqi Yang, Wei Xiang