arXiv Computer Vision

WeakMCN: Multi-task Collaborative Network for Weakly Supervised Referring Expression Comprehension and Segmentation

WeakMCN introduces a multi-task collaborative network that jointly learns weakly supervised referring expression comprehension (WREC) and segmentation (WRES) using a dual-branch architecture. The WREC branch employs anchor-based contrastive learning and serves as a teacher for the WRES branch, while two novel modules—Dynamic Visual Feature Enhancement (DVFE) and Collaborative Consistency Module (CCM)—facilitate cross-task collaboration. Experiments on RefCOCO, RefCOCO+, and RefCOCOg show significant performance gains over single-task baselines, with up to 3.91% and 13.11% improvements on WREC and WRES respectively, and strong generalization in semi-supervised settings.

arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 22

0.5\%>100\%: Bidirectional Reciprocal Learning for Referring Image Segmentation

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.

By Xiaoqiang Lu, Licheng Jiao, Lingling Li, Yuting Yang, Long Sun, Wenping Ma, Xu Liu, Fang Liu
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 3

Towards Open-World Referring Expression Comprehension: A Benchmark with Training-free Multi-task Consistency Checker

The paper introduces OpenRef, a benchmark for Referring Expression Comprehension (REC) designed for open‑world scenarios. OpenRef expands beyond simple settings by including diverse visual domains, variable target counts (multi‑target and none‑target), and a rich vocabulary with proper nouns, polysemous words, and ordinal terms. It also proposes new evaluation metrics—F1 for grounding accuracy and N3R for negative expression rejection—and presents a training‑free Multi‑task Consistency Checker (MCC) that improves model performance with a single click.

By Zongjian Wu, Lei Zhang
arXiv AI
Jul 29

RefBench-PRO: Perceptual and Reasoning Oriented Benchmark for Referring Expression Comprehension

arXiv:2512. 06276v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Referring Expression Comprehension (REC) is a vision-language task that localizes a specific image region based on a textual description.

By Tianyi Gao, Hao Li, Han Fang, Xin Wei, Xiaodong Dong, Hongbo Sun, Ye Yuan, Zhongjiang He, Jinglin Xu, Jingmin Xin, Hao Sun
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 22

DeCo: Efficient Decouple-to-Couple Learning for Multi-Task Visual Grounding

DeCo introduces an efficient decouple-to-couple learning framework for multi-task visual grounding, addressing conflicts between localization and segmentation tasks. It first applies Task-aware Semantic Decoupling (TSD) to separate shared visual cues into task-specific features guided by salient words, then uses Hybrid Prior Coupling (HPC) to merge sentence-level semantic priors with mask-derived spatial priors for improved grounding. Experiments across multiple natural and remote sensing datasets show that DeCo achieves state‑of‑the‑art performance while requiring only lightweight trainable parameters on a frozen multimodal encoder.

By Xiaoqiang Lu, Licheng Jiao, Long Sun, Yuting Yang, Xu Liu, Lingling Li, Wenping Ma, Fang Liu
arXiv AI
Sep 18

Lens: Bringing the Right Semantic Perspective into Focus for Training-Free Multimodal Representation Learning

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.

By Xinran Liu, Shouqian Shi, Yixian Chen, Ruizhi Chen, Xin-Wei Yao, Sheng Zhong
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 24

VIVAS: Vitalizing Visual Perception in VLM Pre-training via Vision-language Unified Autoregressive Supervision

VIVAS is a new Vision‑Language Model pre‑training framework that addresses the lack of fine‑grained visual perception in existing VLMs. It introduces a unified token space and a dense‑structural‑semantic vision tokenizer that expands the textual vocabulary with visual tokens, enabling vision‑language unified autoregressive supervision over both visual details and linguistic content. Trained on 12.4 T tokens, VIVAS achieves state‑of‑the‑art results on 7 tasks and 39 multimodal benchmarks.

By Zhehan Kan, Yubo Zhu, Xinghua Jiang, Zhixiang Wei, Shifeng Liu, Wei Tong, Sheng Zhong, Qingmin Liao, Wenming Yang, Xin Li, Yinsong Liu, Deqiang Jiang, Xing Sun