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
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...
arXiv:2610.08379v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Visual counting is commonly formulated as counting a single specified target, with a model receiving an image-specific exemplar, text query, or target...
By Jinshi Liu, Pan Liu, Lei He, Weichao Luo, Rui Qian
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.
By Anindya Mondal, Sauradip Nag, Anjan Dutta
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
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:2609.37096v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) consistently struggle with fine-grained visual counting, yet the underlying causes remain poorly understood. I...
By Liwei Che, Yihao Quan, Sen Fang, Hongyi Wang, Ranjay Krishna, Ruixiang Tang, Vladimir Pavlovic
DualCount introduces an instance-aware dual-decoder framework that couples density and point representations for zero‑shot object counting. By treating density estimation as a structured mass allocation over latent object instances, it applies two geometric constraints—per‑instance mass conservation and center‑of‑mass alignment—to enforce instance‑level consistency. Experiments on FSC‑147, PUCPR+, and CARPK demonstrate that this approach consistently reduces counting error and achieves new state‑of‑the‑art performance.
By Xuan Cuong Ngo
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:2610.28356v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Object counting in videos remains a poorly characterized capability of multimodal large language models. Counting questions are included in many exis...
By Marc Chapus, Carlos Crispim-Junior, V\'eronique Eglin, Atilla Baskurt
CountZES is an inference‑only framework for zero‑shot object counting that jointly discovers and selects exemplars through density‑guided candidate generation and complementary selection mechanisms. It progresses through three stages—Detection‑Anchored Exemplar, Density‑Guided Exemplar, and Feature‑Consensus Exemplar—to build reliable single‑instance anchors, expand candidate discovery beyond detector constraints, and promote feature‑level representativeness. The method achieves strong cross‑domain generalization and outperforms other inference‑only zero‑shot counting approaches across natural, aerial, and medical datasets.
By Muhammad Ibraheem Siddiqui, Muhammad Haris Khan
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