arXiv AI
3d ago

Background-Free Objectness Learning for Class-Agnostic Detection

Background-Free Objectness Learning (B-FOR) is a dense, class‑agnostic detection framework that learns objectness without treating unlabeled regions as background. It predicts multi‑scale object‑center and scale fields, using spatially structured soft targets to supervise only reliable annotated areas and introduces displacement‑aware scale fields to model object extent. Experiments on PASCAL VOC, MS‑COCO, and Open Images show B‑FOR improves recall by over +10 AR points compared to prior class‑agnostic baselines, with ablation studies confirming the importance of localized supervision and displacement‑aware scaling.

By Dania Batool, Liliana Lo Presti, Marco La Cascia, Filippo Vella
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 28

Retrieval Heads Meet Vision: Uncovering How VLMs Locate and Extract Visual Information

The paper introduces Visual Retrieval Heads (VRHs), a small fraction of attention heads in vision‑language models that are causally responsible for grounding text descriptions to image regions. By recasting head‑scoring methods and evaluating across eleven VLMs and five benchmarks, the authors show that masking the top 20 VRHs can drop grounding accuracy by up to 80 percentage points, while random masking has little effect. VRHs generalize across various visual reference tasks, preserve output format while corrupting localization, and transfer causally across models sharing an LLM backbone.

By Chanho Park, Daehyeon Choi, Jihyun Lee, Minhyuk Sung