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: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
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.
By Rui Wang, Junyi Huang, Jiahui Li, Qiao Yu, Yixue Hao, Long Hu, Baoru Huang
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
The paper introduces VertiCue-Bench, a diagnostic benchmark designed to test whether multimodal large language models (MLLMs) can perceive, ground, and utilize vertical structure information in remote-sensing natural scenes. It presents a three-stage framework—Perception, Grounding, Utilization—and a Representation Intervention Spectrum across various modalities to evaluate ten state-of-the-art models. The study finds a significant Vertical Structure Utilization Gap: while models show some geometric perception, they struggle to accurately link vertical evidence to spatial entities and incorporate it into semantic decisions.
By Jing Huang, Duanchu Wang, Junjie Yang, Zihang Cheng, Cheng Li, Lin Cui, Zhouyi Wu, Di Wang
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.