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 7

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.

By Silin Cheng, Yang Liu, Xinwei He, Sebastien Ourselin, Lei Tan, Gen Luo
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