Daily Papers

Robots operating in homes, warehouses, and other object-rich environments need memory systems that can find specific object instances on demand. Object-level memory alone is often insufficient: scenes contain many plausibly matching objects, and users refer to the target through relations to landmarks and surrounding objects (e.g. ``the tall lamp below the dartboard and to the left of the poster''), demanding a relational spatial memory that supports retrieval through semantic, appearance, and spatial predicates over objects. To achieve this, we present FARM (Find Anything using Relational Spatial Memory), which builds, in real time at 5-10 Hz, a compact, open-vocabulary, object-level memory with geometry, visual-language descriptors, and viewpoint evidence. At query time, FARM uses VLMs to parse the query and score visual evidence, while grounding spatial constraints explicitly through object symbols and relational predicates. This structured use of VLMs enables more accurate and robust retrieval than end-to-end reasoning over frame histories or scene-graph context. In experiments on 44k language queries spanning 67 indoor and outdoor scenes, ranging from 15 to 15,000 m^2, FARM improves Recall@5 and Recall@10 over prior methods by 164% and 224%, and a final VLM reranking stage improves Accuracy@1 by 35%, while running in real time. We further demonstrate closed-loop deployment on a quadrupedal robot using onboard sensors and compute.

Deep learning approaches to natural language processing have made great strides in recent years. While these models produce symbols that convey vast amounts of diverse knowledge, it is unclear how such symbols are grounded in data from the world. In this paper, we explore the development of a private language for visual data representation by training emergent language (EL) encoders/decoders in both i) a traditional referential game environment and ii) a contrastive learning environment utilizing a within-class matching training paradigm. An additional classification layer utilizing neural machine translation and random forest classification was used to transform symbolic representations (sequences of integer symbols) to class labels. These methods were applied in two experiments focusing on object recognition and action recognition. For object recognition, a set of sketches produced by human participants from real imagery was used (Sketchy dataset) and for action recognition, 2D trajectories were generated from 3D motion capture systems (MOVI dataset). In order to interpret the symbols produced for data in each experiment, gradient-weighted class activation mapping (Grad-CAM) methods were used to identify pixel regions indicating semantic features which contribute evidence towards symbols in learned languages. Additionally, a t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding (t-SNE) method was used to investigate embeddings learned by CNN feature extractors.

Video world models trained with Joint Embedding Predictive Architectures (JEPA) acquire rich spatiotemporal representations by predicting masked regions in latent space rather than reconstructing pixels. This removes the visual verification pathway of generative models, creating a structural interpretability gap: the encoder has learned physical structure inaccessible in any inspectable form. Existing probing methods either operate in continuous space without a structured intermediate layer, or attach generative components whose parameters confound attribution of behavior to the encoder. We propose the AI Mother Tongue (AIM) framework as a passive quantization probe: a lightweight, vocabulary-free probe that converts V-JEPA 2 continuous latent vectors into discrete symbol sequences without task-specific supervision or modifying the encoder. Because the encoder is kept completely frozen, any symbolic structure in the AIM codebook is attributable entirely to V-JEPA 2 pre-trained representations -- not to the probe. We evaluate through category-contrast experiments on Kinetics-mini along three physical dimensions: grasp angle, object geometry, and motion temporal structure. AIM symbol distributions differ significantly across all three experiments (chi^2 p < 10^{-4}; MI 0.036--0.117 bits, NMI 1.2--3.9% of the 3-bit maximum; JSD up to 0.342; codebook active ratio 62.5%). The experiments reveal that V-JEPA 2 latent space is markedly compact: diverse action categories share a common representational core, with semantic differences encoded as graded distributional variations rather than categorical boundaries. These results establish Stage 1 of a four-stage roadmap toward an action-conditioned symbolic world model, demonstrating that structured symbolic manifolds are discoverable properties of frozen JEPA latent spaces.

Handwritten Mathematical Expression Recognition (HMER) is a challenging task with many educational applications. Recent methods for HMER have been developed for complex mathematical expressions in standard horizontal format. However, solutions for elementary mathematical expression, such as vertical addition and subtraction, have not been explored in the literature. This work proposes a new handwritten elementary mathematical expression dataset composed of addition and subtraction expressions in a vertical format. We also extended the MNIST dataset to generate artificial images with this structure. Furthermore, we proposed a solution for offline HMER, able to recognize vertical addition and subtraction expressions. Our analysis evaluated the object detection algorithms YOLO v7, YOLO v8, YOLO-NAS, NanoDet and FCOS for identifying the mathematical symbols. We also proposed a transcription method to map the bounding boxes from the object detection stage to a mathematical expression in the LATEX markup sequence. Results show that our approach is efficient, achieving a high expression recognition rate. The code and dataset are available at https://github.com/Danielgol/HME-VAS

We introduce the novel Diffusion Visual Programmer (DVP), a neuro-symbolic image translation framework. Our proposed DVP seamlessly embeds a condition-flexible diffusion model within the GPT architecture, orchestrating a coherent sequence of visual programs (i.e., computer vision models) for various pro-symbolic steps, which span RoI identification, style transfer, and position manipulation, facilitating transparent and controllable image translation processes. Extensive experiments demonstrate DVP's remarkable performance, surpassing concurrent arts. This success can be attributed to several key features of DVP: First, DVP achieves condition-flexible translation via instance normalization, enabling the model to eliminate sensitivity caused by the manual guidance and optimally focus on textual descriptions for high-quality content generation. Second, the framework enhances in-context reasoning by deciphering intricate high-dimensional concepts in feature spaces into more accessible low-dimensional symbols (e.g., [Prompt], [RoI object]), allowing for localized, context-free editing while maintaining overall coherence. Last but not least, DVP improves systemic controllability and explainability by offering explicit symbolic representations at each programming stage, empowering users to intuitively interpret and modify results. Our research marks a substantial step towards harmonizing artificial image translation processes with cognitive intelligence, promising broader applications.

The rapid development of large language and vision models (LLVMs) has been driven by advances in visual instruction tuning. Recently, open-source LLVMs have curated high-quality visual instruction tuning datasets and utilized additional vision encoders or multiple computer vision models in order to narrow the performance gap with powerful closed-source LLVMs. These advancements are attributed to multifaceted information required for diverse capabilities, including fundamental image understanding, real-world knowledge about common-sense and non-object concepts (e.g., charts, diagrams, symbols, signs, and math problems), and step-by-step procedures for solving complex questions. Drawing from the multifaceted information, we present a new efficient LLVM, Mamba-based traversal of rationales (Meteor), which leverages multifaceted rationale to enhance understanding and answering capabilities. To embed lengthy rationales containing abundant information, we employ the Mamba architecture, capable of processing sequential data with linear time complexity. We introduce a new concept of traversal of rationale that facilitates efficient embedding of rationale. Subsequently, the backbone multimodal language model (MLM) is trained to generate answers with the aid of rationale. Through these steps, Meteor achieves significant improvements in vision language performances across multiple evaluation benchmarks requiring diverse capabilities, without scaling up the model size or employing additional vision encoders and computer vision models.

Recent research has evidenced the significant potentials of Large Language Models (LLMs) in handling challenging tasks within 3D scenes. However, current models are constrained to addressing object-centric tasks, where each question-answer pair focuses solely on an individual object. In real-world applications, users may pose queries involving multiple objects or expect for answers that precisely reference various objects. We introduce the use of object identifiers to freely reference objects during a conversation. While this solution appears straightforward, it presents two main challenges: 1) How to establish a reliable one-to-one correspondence between each object and its identifier? 2) How to incorporate complex spatial relationships among dozens of objects into the embedding space of the LLM? To address these challenges, we propose a two-stage alignment method, which involves learning an attribute-aware token and a relation-aware token for each object. These tokens capture the object's attributes and spatial relationships with surrounding objects in the 3D scene. Once the alignment is established, we can fine-tune our model on various downstream tasks using instruction tuning. Experiments conducted on traditional datasets like ScanQA, ScanRefer, and Nr3D/Sr3D showcase the effectiveness of our proposed method. Additionally, we create a 3D scene captioning dataset annotated with rich object identifiers, with the assistant of GPT-4. This dataset aims to further explore the capability of object identifiers in effective object referencing and precise scene understanding.

To accurately process a visual scene, observers must bind features together to represent individual objects. This capacity is necessary, for instance, to distinguish an image containing a red square and a blue circle from an image containing a blue square and a red circle. Recent work has found that language models solve this 'binding problem' via a set of symbol-like, content-independent indices, but it is unclear whether similar mechanisms are employed by Vision Language Models (VLMs). This question is especially relevant, given the persistent failures of VLMs on tasks that require binding. Here, we identify a previously unknown set of emergent symbolic mechanisms that support binding specifically in VLMs, via a content-independent, spatial indexing scheme. Moreover, we find that binding errors, when they occur, can be traced directly to failures in these mechanisms. Taken together, these results shed light on the mechanisms that support symbol-like processing in VLMs, and suggest possible avenues for reducing the number of binding failures exhibited by these models.

Object hallucination remains a persistent reliability issue in large vision-language models, where generated object mentions may sound plausible but lack visual grounding. Recent training-free detectors use internal signals such as token likelihood, attention, visual confidence, or image-text similarity to identify hallucinated objects. These signals are useful, but they are often source-confounded. They measure how strongly an object is supported inside the model without distinguishing whether that support comes from object-specific visual evidence or the generated text prefix. In difficult cases, a hallucinated object can still receive high internal support because it fits the scene, is associated with nearby visual cues, or follows naturally from the generated text prefix. We propose VisER, a training-free two-sided metric for object-level hallucination detection. VisER evaluates each generated object mention from two complementary views. Visual Evidence measures whether object-context compatibility is backed by object-specific evidence from image tokens. Visual Reliance measures whether the object is supported more by the image than by the generated prefix. Combining these views gives a more source-aware grounding score, while avoiding additional object-level verification generations. Across multiple LVLMs and benchmarks, VisER improves AUROC and AUPR over a range of baselines.

Classifying logo images is a challenging task as they contain elements such as text or shapes that can represent anything from known objects to abstract shapes. While the current state of the art for logo classification addresses the problem as a multi-class task focusing on a single characteristic, logos can have several simultaneous labels, such as different colors. This work proposes a method that allows visually similar logos to be classified and searched from a set of data according to their shape, color, commercial sector, semantics, general characteristics, or a combination of features selected by the user. Unlike previous approaches, the proposal employs a series of multi-label deep neural networks specialized in specific attributes and combines the obtained features to perform the similarity search. To delve into the classification system, different existing logo topologies are compared and some of their problems are analyzed, such as the incomplete labeling that trademark registration databases usually contain. The proposal is evaluated considering 76,000 logos (7 times more than previous approaches) from the European Union Trademarks dataset, which is organized hierarchically using the Vienna ontology. Overall, experimentation attains reliable quantitative and qualitative results, reducing the normalized average rank error of the state-of-the-art from 0.040 to 0.018 for the Trademark Image Retrieval task. Finally, given that the semantics of logos can often be subjective, graphic design students and professionals were surveyed. Results show that the proposed methodology provides better labeling than a human expert operator, improving the label ranking average precision from 0.53 to 0.68.

How multimodal large language models (MLLMs) perceive the visual world remains a mystery. To one extreme, object and relation modeling may be implicitly implemented with inductive biases, for example by treating objects as tokens. To the other extreme, empirical results reveal the surprising finding that simply performing visual captioning, which tends to ignore spatial configuration of the objects, serves as a strong baseline for video understanding. We aim to answer the question: how can objects help video-language understanding in MLLMs? We tackle the question from the object representation and adaptation perspectives. Specifically, we investigate the trade-off between representation expressiveness (e.g., distributed versus symbolic) and integration difficulty (e.g., data-efficiency when learning the adapters). Through extensive evaluations on five video question answering datasets, we confirm that explicit integration of object-centric representation remains necessary, and the symbolic objects can be most easily integrated while being performant for question answering. We hope our findings can encourage the community to explore the explicit integration of perception modules into MLLM design. Our code and models will be publicly released.

This paper presents Objectness SIMilarity (OSIM), a novel evaluation metric for 3D scenes that explicitly focuses on "objects," which are fundamental units of human visual perception. Existing metrics assess overall image quality, leading to discrepancies with human perception. Inspired by neuropsychological insights, we hypothesize that human recognition of 3D scenes fundamentally involves attention to individual objects. OSIM enables object-centric evaluations by leveraging an object detection model and its feature representations to quantify the "objectness" of each object in the scene. Our user study demonstrates that OSIM aligns more closely with human perception compared to existing metrics. We also analyze the characteristics of OSIM using various approaches. Moreover, we re-evaluate recent 3D reconstruction and generation models under a standardized experimental setup to clarify advancements in this field. The code is available at https://github.com/Objectness-Similarity/OSIM.

Understanding objects is a central building block of artificial intelligence, especially for embodied AI. Even though object recognition excels with deep learning, current machines still struggle to learn higher-level knowledge, e.g., what attributes an object has, and what can we do with an object. In this work, we propose a challenging Object Concept Learning (OCL) task to push the envelope of object understanding. It requires machines to reason out object affordances and simultaneously give the reason: what attributes make an object possesses these affordances. To support OCL, we build a densely annotated knowledge base including extensive labels for three levels of object concept (category, attribute, affordance), and the causal relations of three levels. By analyzing the causal structure of OCL, we present a baseline, Object Concept Reasoning Network (OCRN). It leverages causal intervention and concept instantiation to infer the three levels following their causal relations. In experiments, OCRN effectively infers the object knowledge while following the causalities well. Our data and code are available at https://mvig-rhos.com/ocl.

Mathematical symbols and descriptions appear in various forms across document section boundaries without explicit markup. In this paper, we present a new large-scale dataset that emphasizes extracting symbols and descriptions in scientific documents. Symlink annotates scientific papers of 5 different domains (i.e., computer science, biology, physics, mathematics, and economics). Our experiments on Symlink demonstrate the challenges of the symbol-description linking task for existing models and call for further research effort in this area. We will publicly release Symlink to facilitate future research.

Object binding, the brain's ability to bind the many features that collectively represent an object into a coherent whole, is central to human cognition. It groups low-level perceptual features into high-level object representations, stores those objects efficiently and compositionally in memory, and supports human reasoning about individual object instances. While prior work often imposes object-centric attention (e.g., Slot Attention) explicitly to probe these benefits, it remains unclear whether this ability naturally emerges in pre-trained Vision Transformers (ViTs). Intuitively, they could: recognizing which patches belong to the same object should be useful for downstream prediction and thus guide attention. Motivated by the quadratic nature of self-attention, we hypothesize that ViTs represent whether two patches belong to the same object, a property we term IsSameObject. We decode IsSameObject from patch embeddings across ViT layers using a similarity probe, which reaches over 90% accuracy. Crucially, this object-binding capability emerges reliably in self-supervised ViTs (DINO, MAE, CLIP), but markedly weaker in ImageNet-supervised models, suggesting that binding is not a trivial architectural artifact, but an ability acquired through specific pretraining objectives. We further discover that IsSameObject is encoded in a low-dimensional subspace on top of object features, and that this signal actively guides attention. Ablating IsSameObject from model activations degrades downstream performance and works against the learning objective, implying that emergent object binding naturally serves the pretraining objective. Our findings challenge the view that ViTs lack object binding and highlight how symbolic knowledge of "which parts belong together" emerges naturally in a connectionist system.

Recent advances in training-free visual prompting, such as Set-of-Mark, have emerged as a promising direction for enhancing the grounding capabilities of multimodal language models (MLMs). These techniques operate by partitioning the input image into object regions and annotating them with marks, predominantly boxes with numeric identifiers, before feeding the augmented image to the MLM. However, these approaches treat marked objects as isolated entities, failing to capture the relationships between them. On these premises, we propose Graph-of-Mark (GoM), the first pixel-level visual prompting technique that overlays scene graphs onto the input image for spatial reasoning tasks. We evaluate GoM across 3 open-source MLMs and 4 different datasets, conducting extensive ablations on drawn components and investigating the impact of auxiliary graph descriptions in the text prompt. Our results demonstrate that GoM consistently improves the zero-shot capability of MLMs in interpreting object positions and relative directions, improving base accuracy in visual question answering and localization up to 11 percentage points.

We present an open-vocabulary and zero-shot method for arbitrary referring expression segmentation (RES), targeting input expressions that are more general than what prior works were designed to handle. Specifically, our inputs encompass both object- and part-level labels as well as implicit references pointing to properties or qualities of object/part function, design, style, material, etc. Our model, coined RESAnything, leverages Chain-of-Thoughts (CoT) reasoning, where the key idea is attribute prompting. We generate detailed descriptions of object/part attributes including shape, color, and location for potential segment proposals through systematic prompting of a large language model (LLM), where the proposals are produced by a foundational image segmentation model. Our approach encourages deep reasoning about object or part attributes related to function, style, design, etc., enabling the system to handle implicit queries without any part annotations for training or fine-tuning. As the first zero-shot and LLM-based RES method, RESAnything achieves clearly superior performance among zero-shot methods on traditional RES benchmarks and significantly outperforms existing methods on challenging scenarios involving implicit queries and complex part-level relations. Finally, we contribute a new benchmark dataset to offer ~3K carefully curated RES instances to assess part-level, arbitrary RES solutions.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are powerful tools for processing and understanding text and images. We study the processing of visual tokens in the language model component of LLaVA, a prominent VLM. Our approach focuses on analyzing the localization of object information, the evolution of visual token representations across layers, and the mechanism of integrating visual information for predictions. Through ablation studies, we demonstrated that object identification accuracy drops by over 70\% when object-specific tokens are removed. We observed that visual token representations become increasingly interpretable in the vocabulary space across layers, suggesting an alignment with textual tokens corresponding to image content. Finally, we found that the model extracts object information from these refined representations at the last token position for prediction, mirroring the process in text-only language models for factual association tasks. These findings provide crucial insights into how VLMs process and integrate visual information, bridging the gap between our understanding of language and vision models, and paving the way for more interpretable and controllable multimodal systems.

We revisit the problem of Object-Goal Navigation (ObjectNav). In its simplest form, ObjectNav is defined as the task of navigating to an object, specified by its label, in an unexplored environment. In particular, the agent is initialized at a random location and pose in an environment and asked to find an instance of an object category, e.g., find a chair, by navigating to it. As the community begins to show increased interest in semantic goal specification for navigation tasks, a number of different often-inconsistent interpretations of this task are emerging. This document summarizes the consensus recommendations of this working group on ObjectNav. In particular, we make recommendations on subtle but important details of evaluation criteria (for measuring success when navigating towards a target object), the agent's embodiment parameters, and the characteristics of the environments within which the task is carried out. Finally, we provide a detailed description of the instantiation of these recommendations in challenges organized at the Embodied AI workshop at CVPR 2020 http://embodied-ai.org .

Diagrams serve as a fundamental form of visual language, representing complex concepts and their inter-relationships through structured symbols, shapes, and spatial arrangements. Unlike natural images, their inherently symbolic and abstract nature poses significant challenges for Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). However, current benchmarks conflate perceptual and reasoning tasks, making it difficult to assess whether MLLMs genuinely understand mathematical diagrams beyond superficial pattern recognition. To address this gap, we introduce MATHGLANCE, a benchmark specifically designed to isolate and evaluate mathematical perception in MLLMs. MATHGLANCE comprises 1.2K images and 1.6K carefully curated questions spanning four perception tasks: shape classification, object counting, relationship identification, and object grounding, covering diverse domains including plane geometry, solid geometry, and graphical representations. Our evaluation of MLLMs reveals that their ability to understand diagrams is notably limited, particularly in fine-grained grounding tasks. In response, we construct GeoPeP, a perception-oriented dataset of 200K structured geometry image-text pairs explicitly annotated with geometric primitives and precise spatial relationships. Training MLLM on GeoPeP leads to significant gains in perceptual accuracy, which in turn substantially improves mathematical reasoning. Our benchmark and dataset establish critical standards for evaluating and advancing multimodal mathematical understanding, providing valuable resources and insights to foster future MLLM research.

Object hallucination in vision-language models (VLMs) is usually measured by checking each object a caption names against the image. Most benchmarks and detectors alike treat every object mention as a claim that the object is present. This assumption fails when a caption names an object without asserting it, as in "a bench for people to sit on", which mentions people without claiming that any are in the image. We call such mentions non-assertive. Treating them as hallucinations inflates the error rates attributed to models that use such language. To separate them from real hallucinations, we introduce NAME-Bench (Non-Assertive Mention Evaluation Benchmark), 25,497 object mentions from captions that five VLMs generate for COCO images. Each mention is labelled concrete (asserted and present), hallucinated (asserted and absent), or non-assertive, and non-assertive mentions are further divided into four subtypes: depictive, purpose, negation and hedged. All the hallucination detectors that we evaluate flag non-assertive mentions as hallucinations, at rates between 14% and 80%. Adding non-assertive mentions to detector training as negatives largely corrects this on LLaVA-1.5. On the four newer VLMs, a comparable correction takes five to ten times more data, and the detectors then catch fewer real hallucinations. These findings show that current detectors conflate mentioning an object with asserting it, and that this conflation is harder to undo on the four newer VLMs than on LLaVA-1.5. Hallucination evaluation should therefore separate what a caption asserts from what it merely mentions.

Detecting objects based on language information is a popular task that includes Open-Vocabulary object Detection (OVD) and Referring Expression Comprehension (REC). In this paper, we advance them to a more practical setting called Described Object Detection (DOD) by expanding category names to flexible language expressions for OVD and overcoming the limitation of REC only grounding the pre-existing object. We establish the research foundation for DOD by constructing a Description Detection Dataset (D^3). This dataset features flexible language expressions, whether short category names or long descriptions, and annotating all described objects on all images without omission. By evaluating previous SOTA methods on D^3, we find some troublemakers that fail current REC, OVD, and bi-functional methods. REC methods struggle with confidence scores, rejecting negative instances, and multi-target scenarios, while OVD methods face constraints with long and complex descriptions. Recent bi-functional methods also do not work well on DOD due to their separated training procedures and inference strategies for REC and OVD tasks. Building upon the aforementioned findings, we propose a baseline that largely improves REC methods by reconstructing the training data and introducing a binary classification sub-task, outperforming existing methods. Data and code are available at https://github.com/shikras/d-cube and related works are tracked in https://github.com/Charles-Xie/awesome-described-object-detection.

Language-based object detection is a promising direction towards building a natural interface to describe objects in images that goes far beyond plain category names. While recent methods show great progress in that direction, proper evaluation is lacking. With OmniLabel, we propose a novel task definition, dataset, and evaluation metric. The task subsumes standard- and open-vocabulary detection as well as referring expressions. With more than 28K unique object descriptions on over 25K images, OmniLabel provides a challenging benchmark with diverse and complex object descriptions in a naturally open-vocabulary setting. Moreover, a key differentiation to existing benchmarks is that our object descriptions can refer to one, multiple or even no object, hence, providing negative examples in free-form text. The proposed evaluation handles the large label space and judges performance via a modified average precision metric, which we validate by evaluating strong language-based baselines. OmniLabel indeed provides a challenging test bed for future research on language-based detection.

Object-centric learning (OCL) aspires general and compositional understanding of scenes by representing a scene as a collection of object-centric representations. OCL has also been extended to multi-view image and video datasets to apply various data-driven inductive biases by utilizing geometric or temporal information in the multi-image data. Single-view images carry less information about how to disentangle a given scene than videos or multi-view images do. Hence, owing to the difficulty of applying inductive biases, OCL for single-view images remains challenging, resulting in inconsistent learning of object-centric representation. To this end, we introduce a novel OCL framework for single-view images, SLot Attention via SHepherding (SLASH), which consists of two simple-yet-effective modules on top of Slot Attention. The new modules, Attention Refining Kernel (ARK) and Intermediate Point Predictor and Encoder (IPPE), respectively, prevent slots from being distracted by the background noise and indicate locations for slots to focus on to facilitate learning of object-centric representation. We also propose a weak semi-supervision approach for OCL, whilst our proposed framework can be used without any assistant annotation during the inference. Experiments show that our proposed method enables consistent learning of object-centric representation and achieves strong performance across four datasets. Code is available at https://github.com/object-understanding/SLASH.

3D Gaussian Splatting is renowned for its high-fidelity reconstructions and real-time novel view synthesis, yet its lack of semantic understanding limits object-level perception. In this work, we propose ObjectGS, an object-aware framework that unifies 3D scene reconstruction with semantic understanding. Instead of treating the scene as a unified whole, ObjectGS models individual objects as local anchors that generate neural Gaussians and share object IDs, enabling precise object-level reconstruction. During training, we dynamically grow or prune these anchors and optimize their features, while a one-hot ID encoding with a classification loss enforces clear semantic constraints. We show through extensive experiments that ObjectGS not only outperforms state-of-the-art methods on open-vocabulary and panoptic segmentation tasks, but also integrates seamlessly with applications like mesh extraction and scene editing. Project page: https://ruijiezhu94.github.io/ObjectGS_page

For a vision-language model (VLM) to understand the physical world, such as cause and effect, a first step is to capture the temporal dynamics of the visual world, for example how the physical states of objects evolve over time (e.g. a whole apple into a sliced apple). Our paper aims to investigate if VLMs pre-trained on web-scale data learn to encode object states, which can be extracted with zero-shot text prompts. We curate an object state recognition dataset ChangeIt-Frames, and evaluate nine open-source VLMs, including models trained with contrastive and generative objectives. We observe that while these state-of-the-art vision-language models can reliably perform object recognition, they consistently fail to accurately distinguish the objects' physical states. Through extensive experiments, we identify three areas for improvements for VLMs to better encode object states, namely the quality of object localization, the architecture to bind concepts to objects, and the objective to learn discriminative visual and language encoders on object states. Data and code are released.

Vision language models (VLMs) have achieved remarkable success in broad visual understanding, yet they remain challenged by object-centric reasoning on rare objects due to the scarcity of such instances in pretraining data. While prior efforts alleviate this issue by retrieving additional data or introducing stronger vision encoders, these methods are still computationally intensive during finetuning VLMs and don't fully exploit the original training data. In this paper, we introduce an efficient plug-and-play module that substantially improves VLMs' reasoning over rare objects by refining visual tokens and enriching input text prompts, without VLMs finetuning. Specifically, we propose to learn multi-modal class embeddings for rare objects by leveraging prior knowledge from vision foundation models and synonym-augmented text descriptions, compensating for limited training examples. These embeddings refine the visual tokens in VLMs through a lightweight attention-based enhancement module that improves fine-grained object details. In addition, we use the learned embeddings as object-aware detectors to generate informative hints, which are injected into the text prompts to help guide the VLM's attention toward relevant image regions. Experiments on two benchmarks show consistent and substantial gains for pretrained VLMs in rare object recognition and reasoning. Further analysis reveals how our method strengthens the VLM's ability to focus on and reason about rare objects.

The extraction of modular object-centric representations for downstream tasks is an emerging area of research. Learning grounded representations of objects that are guaranteed to be stable and invariant promises robust performance across different tasks and environments. Slot Attention (SA) learns object-centric representations by assigning objects to slots, but presupposes a single distribution from which all slots are randomly initialised. This results in an inability to learn specialized slots which bind to specific object types and remain invariant to identity-preserving changes in object appearance. To address this, we present \textsc{Conditional Slot Attention} (CoSA) using a novel concept of Grounded Slot Dictionary (GSD) inspired by vector quantization. Our proposed GSD comprises (i) canonical object-level property vectors and (ii) parametric Gaussian distributions, which define a prior over the slots. We demonstrate the benefits of our method in multiple downstream tasks such as scene generation, composition, and task adaptation, whilst remaining competitive with SA in popular object discovery benchmarks.

Aligning objects with corresponding textual descriptions is a fundamental challenge and a realistic requirement in vision-language understanding. While recent multimodal embedding models excel at global image-text alignment, they often struggle with fine-grained alignment between image regions and specific phrases. In this work, we present ObjEmbed, a novel MLLM embedding model that decomposes the input image into multiple regional embeddings, each corresponding to an individual object, along with global embeddings. It supports a wide range of visual understanding tasks like visual grounding, local image retrieval, and global image retrieval. ObjEmbed enjoys three key properties: (1) Object-Oriented Representation: It captures both semantic and spatial aspects of objects by generating two complementary embeddings for each region: an object embedding for semantic matching and an IoU embedding that predicts localization quality. The final object matching score combines semantic similarity with the predicted IoU, enabling more accurate retrieval. (2) Versatility: It seamlessly handles both region-level and image-level tasks. (3) Efficient Encoding: All objects in an image, along with the full image, are encoded in a single forward pass for high efficiency. Superior performance on 18 diverse benchmarks demonstrates its strong semantic discrimination.

Developing deep learning models that effectively learn object-centric representations, akin to human cognition, remains a challenging task. Existing approaches facilitate object discovery by representing objects as fixed-size vectors, called ``slots'' or ``object files''. While these approaches have shown promise in certain scenarios, they still exhibit certain limitations. First, they rely on architectural priors which can be unreliable and usually require meticulous engineering to identify the correct objects. Second, there has been a notable gap in investigating the practical utility of these representations in downstream tasks. To address the first limitation, we introduce a method that explicitly optimizes the constraint that each object in a scene should be associated with a distinct slot. We formalize this constraint by introducing consistency objectives which are cyclic in nature. By integrating these consistency objectives into various existing slot-based object-centric methods, we showcase substantial improvements in object-discovery performance. These enhancements consistently hold true across both synthetic and real-world scenes, underscoring the effectiveness and adaptability of the proposed approach. To tackle the second limitation, we apply the learned object-centric representations from the proposed method to two downstream reinforcement learning tasks, demonstrating considerable performance enhancements compared to conventional slot-based and monolithic representation learning methods. Our results suggest that the proposed approach not only improves object discovery, but also provides richer features for downstream tasks.

Industrial diagrams such as piping and instrumentation diagrams (P&IDs) are essential for the design, operation, and maintenance of industrial plants. Converting these diagrams into digital form is an important step toward building digital twins and enabling intelligent industrial automation. A central challenge in this digitalization process is accurate object detection. Although recent advances have significantly improved object detection algorithms, there remains a lack of methods to automatically evaluate the quality of their outputs. This paper addresses this gap by introducing a framework that employs Visual Language Models (VLMs) to assess object detection results and guide their refinement. The approach exploits the multimodal capabilities of VLMs to identify missing or inconsistent detections, thereby enabling automated quality assessment and improving overall detection performance on complex industrial diagrams.

The neural implicit representation has shown its effectiveness in novel view synthesis and high-quality 3D reconstruction from multi-view images. However, most approaches focus on holistic scene representation yet ignore individual objects inside it, thus limiting potential downstream applications. In order to learn object-compositional representation, a few works incorporate the 2D semantic map as a cue in training to grasp the difference between objects. But they neglect the strong connections between object geometry and instance semantic information, which leads to inaccurate modeling of individual instance. This paper proposes a novel framework, ObjectSDF, to build an object-compositional neural implicit representation with high fidelity in 3D reconstruction and object representation. Observing the ambiguity of conventional volume rendering pipelines, we model the scene by combining the Signed Distance Functions (SDF) of individual object to exert explicit surface constraint. The key in distinguishing different instances is to revisit the strong association between an individual object's SDF and semantic label. Particularly, we convert the semantic information to a function of object SDF and develop a unified and compact representation for scene and objects. Experimental results show the superiority of ObjectSDF framework in representing both the holistic object-compositional scene and the individual instances. Code can be found at https://qianyiwu.github.io/objectsdf/

We investigate the problem of producing structured graph representations of visual scenes. Our work analyzes the role of motifs: regularly appearing substructures in scene graphs. We present new quantitative insights on such repeated structures in the Visual Genome dataset. Our analysis shows that object labels are highly predictive of relation labels but not vice-versa. We also find that there are recurring patterns even in larger subgraphs: more than 50% of graphs contain motifs involving at least two relations. Our analysis motivates a new baseline: given object detections, predict the most frequent relation between object pairs with the given labels, as seen in the training set. This baseline improves on the previous state-of-the-art by an average of 3.6% relative improvement across evaluation settings. We then introduce Stacked Motif Networks, a new architecture designed to capture higher order motifs in scene graphs that further improves over our strong baseline by an average 7.1% relative gain. Our code is available at github.com/rowanz/neural-motifs.

Object-centric learning (OCL) seeks to learn representations that only encode an object, isolated from other objects or background cues in a scene. This approach underpins various aims, including out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization, sample-efficient composition, and modeling of structured environments. Most research has focused on developing unsupervised mechanisms that separate objects into discrete slots in the representation space, evaluated using unsupervised object discovery. However, with recent sample-efficient segmentation models, we can separate objects in the pixel space and encode them independently. This achieves remarkable zero-shot performance on OOD object discovery benchmarks, is scalable to foundation models, and can handle a variable number of slots out-of-the-box. Hence, the goal of OCL methods to obtain object-centric representations has been largely achieved. Despite this progress, a key question remains: How does the ability to separate objects within a scene contribute to broader OCL objectives, such as OOD generalization? We address this by investigating the OOD generalization challenge caused by spurious background cues through the lens of OCL. We propose a novel, training-free probe called Object-Centric Classification with Applied Masks (OCCAM), demonstrating that segmentation-based encoding of individual objects significantly outperforms slot-based OCL methods. However, challenges in real-world applications remain. We provide the toolbox for the OCL community to use scalable object-centric representations, and focus on practical applications and fundamental questions, such as understanding object perception in human cognition. Our code is available https://github.com/AlexanderRubinstein/OCCAM{here}.

Visual language is a system of communication that conveys information through symbols, shapes, and spatial arrangements. Diagrams are a typical example of a visual language depicting complex concepts and their relationships in the form of an image. The symbolic nature of diagrams presents significant challenges for building models capable of understanding them. Yet, recent studies seem to suggest that Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) can even tackle complex reasoning tasks involving diagrams. In this paper, we investigate this phenomenon by developing a comprehensive test suite to evaluate the diagram comprehension capability of LVLMs. Our test suite uses a variety of questions focused on concept entities and their relationships over a set of synthetic as well as real diagrams across several domains to evaluate the recognition and reasoning abilities of models. Our evaluation of three LVLMs (GPT-4V, GPT-4o, and Gemini) shows that while these models can accurately identify and reason about entities, their ability to understand relationships is notably limited. Further testing reveals that the decent performance on diagram understanding largely stems from leveraging their background knowledge as shortcuts to identify and reason about the relational information. Thus, we conclude that LVLMs have a limited capability for genuine diagram understanding, and their impressive performance in diagram reasoning is an illusion emanating from other confounding factors, such as the background knowledge in the models.

We study the task of panoptic symbol spotting, which involves identifying both individual instances of countable things and the semantic regions of uncountable stuff in computer-aided design (CAD) drawings composed of vector graphical primitives. Existing methods typically rely on image rasterization, graph construction, or point-based representation, but these approaches often suffer from high computational costs, limited generality, and loss of geometric structural information. In this paper, we propose VecFormer, a novel method that addresses these challenges through line-based representation of primitives. This design preserves the geometric continuity of the original primitive, enabling more accurate shape representation while maintaining a computation-friendly structure, making it well-suited for vector graphic understanding tasks. To further enhance prediction reliability, we introduce a Branch Fusion Refinement module that effectively integrates instance and semantic predictions, resolving their inconsistencies for more coherent panoptic outputs. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method establishes a new state-of-the-art, achieving 91.1 PQ, with Stuff-PQ improved by 9.6 and 21.2 points over the second-best results under settings with and without prior information, respectively, highlighting the strong potential of line-based representation as a foundation for vector graphic understanding.

We propose InstructDET, a data-centric method for referring object detection (ROD) that localizes target objects based on user instructions. While deriving from referring expressions (REC), the instructions we leverage are greatly diversified to encompass common user intentions related to object detection. For one image, we produce tremendous instructions that refer to every single object and different combinations of multiple objects. Each instruction and its corresponding object bounding boxes (bbxs) constitute one training data pair. In order to encompass common detection expressions, we involve emerging vision-language model (VLM) and large language model (LLM) to generate instructions guided by text prompts and object bbxs, as the generalizations of foundation models are effective to produce human-like expressions (e.g., describing object property, category, and relationship). We name our constructed dataset as InDET. It contains images, bbxs and generalized instructions that are from foundation models. Our InDET is developed from existing REC datasets and object detection datasets, with the expanding potential that any image with object bbxs can be incorporated through using our InstructDET method. By using our InDET dataset, we show that a conventional ROD model surpasses existing methods on standard REC datasets and our InDET test set. Our data-centric method InstructDET, with automatic data expansion by leveraging foundation models, directs a promising field that ROD can be greatly diversified to execute common object detection instructions.

Large vision language models (LVLMs) often suffer from object hallucination, producing objects not present in the given images. While current benchmarks for object hallucination primarily concentrate on the presence of a single object class rather than individual entities, this work systematically investigates multi-object hallucination, examining how models misperceive (e.g., invent nonexistent objects or become distracted) when tasked with focusing on multiple objects simultaneously. We introduce Recognition-based Object Probing Evaluation (ROPE), an automated evaluation protocol that considers the distribution of object classes within a single image during testing and uses visual referring prompts to eliminate ambiguity. With comprehensive empirical studies and analysis of potential factors leading to multi-object hallucination, we found that (1) LVLMs suffer more hallucinations when focusing on multiple objects compared to a single object. (2) The tested object class distribution affects hallucination behaviors, indicating that LVLMs may follow shortcuts and spurious correlations.(3) Hallucinatory behaviors are influenced by data-specific factors, salience and frequency, and model intrinsic behaviors. We hope to enable LVLMs to recognize and reason about multiple objects that often occur in realistic visual scenes, provide insights, and quantify our progress towards mitigating the issues.

Language-based object detection (LOD) aims to align visual objects with language expressions. A large amount of paired data is utilized to improve LOD model generalizations. During the training process, recent studies leverage vision-language models (VLMs) to automatically generate human-like expressions for visual objects, facilitating training data scaling up. In this process, we observe that VLM hallucinations bring inaccurate object descriptions (e.g., object name, color, and shape) to deteriorate VL alignment quality. To reduce VLM hallucinations, we propose an agentic workflow controlled by an LLM to re-align language to visual objects via adaptively adjusting image and text prompts. We name this workflow Real-LOD, which includes planning, tool use, and reflection steps. Given an image with detected objects and VLM raw language expressions, Real-LOD reasons its state automatically and arranges action based on our neural symbolic designs (i.e., planning). The action will adaptively adjust the image and text prompts and send them to VLMs for object re-description (i.e., tool use). Then, we use another LLM to analyze these refined expressions for feedback (i.e., reflection). These steps are conducted in a cyclic form to gradually improve language descriptions for re-aligning to visual objects. We construct a dataset that contains a tiny amount of 0.18M images with re-aligned language expression and train a prevalent LOD model to surpass existing LOD methods by around 50% on the standard benchmarks. Our Real-LOD workflow, with automatic VL refinement, reveals a potential to preserve data quality along with scaling up data quantity, which further improves LOD performance from a data-alignment perspective.

While vision-language models (VLMs) have made remarkable progress on many popular visual question answering (VQA) benchmarks, it remains unclear whether they abstract and reason over depicted objects. Inspired by human object categorisation, object property reasoning involves identifying and recognising low-level details and higher-level abstractions. While current VQA benchmarks consider a limited set of object property attributes like size, they typically blend perception and reasoning, and lack representativeness in terms of reasoning and image categories. To this end, we introduce a systematic evaluation framework with images of three representative types, three reasoning levels of increasing complexity, and four object property dimensions driven by prior work on commonsense reasoning. We develop a procedure to instantiate this benchmark into ORBIT, a multi-level reasoning VQA benchmark for object properties comprising 360 images paired with a total of 1,080 count-based questions. Experiments with 12 state-of-the-art VLMs in zero-shot settings reveal significant limitations compared to humans, with the best-performing model only reaching 40\% accuracy. VLMs struggle particularly with realistic (photographic) images, counterfactual reasoning about physical and functional properties, and higher counts. ORBIT points to the need to develop methods for scalable benchmarking, generalize annotation guidelines, and explore additional reasoning VLMs. We make the ORBIT benchmark and the experimental code available to support such endeavors.

Object-centric (OC) representations, which represent the state of a visual scene by modeling it as a composition of objects, have the potential to be used in various downstream tasks to achieve systematic compositional generalization and facilitate reasoning. However, these claims have not been thoroughly analyzed yet. Recently, foundation models have demonstrated unparalleled capabilities across diverse domains from language to computer vision, marking them as a potential cornerstone of future research for a multitude of computational tasks. In this paper, we conduct an extensive empirical study on representation learning for downstream Visual Question Answering (VQA), which requires an accurate compositional understanding of the scene. We thoroughly investigate the benefits and trade-offs of OC models and alternative approaches including large pre-trained foundation models on both synthetic and real-world data, and demonstrate a viable way to achieve the best of both worlds. The extensiveness of our study, encompassing over 600 downstream VQA models and 15 different types of upstream representations, also provides several additional insights that we believe will be of interest to the community at large.

Object hallucination has been an Achilles' heel which hinders the broader applications of large vision-language models (LVLMs). Object hallucination refers to the phenomenon that the LVLMs claim non-existent objects in the image. To mitigate the object hallucinations, instruction tuning and external model-based detection methods have been proposed, which either require large-scare computational resources or depend on the detection result of external models. However, there remains an under-explored field to utilize the LVLM itself to alleviate object hallucinations. In this work, we adopt the intuition that the LVLM tends to respond logically consistently for existent objects but inconsistently for hallucinated objects. Therefore, we propose a Logical Closed Loop-based framework for Object Hallucination Detection and Mitigation, namely LogicCheckGPT. In specific, we devise logical consistency probing to raise questions with logical correlations, inquiring about attributes from objects and vice versa. Whether their responses can form a logical closed loop serves as an indicator of object hallucination. As a plug-and-play method, it can be seamlessly applied to all existing LVLMs. Comprehensive experiments conducted on three benchmarks across four LVLMs have demonstrated significant improvements brought by our method, indicating its effectiveness and generality.

While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable success in interpreting natural scenes, their ability to process discrete symbols -- the fundamental building blocks of human cognition -- remains a critical open question. Unlike continuous visual data, symbols such as mathematical formulas, chemical structures, and linguistic characters require precise, deeper interpretation. This paper introduces a comprehensive benchmark to evaluate how top-tier MLLMs navigate these "discrete semantic spaces" across five domains: language, culture, mathematics, physics, and chemistry. Our investigation uncovers a counterintuitive phenomenon: models often fail at basic symbol recognition yet succeed in complex reasoning tasks, suggesting they rely on linguistic probability rather than true visual perception. By exposing this "cognitive mismatch", we highlight a significant gap in current AI capabilities: the struggle to truly perceive and understand the symbolic languages that underpin scientific discovery and abstract thought. This work offers a roadmap for developing more rigorous, human-aligned intelligent systems.

Learning object-centric scene representations is essential for attaining structural understanding and abstraction of complex scenes. Yet, as current approaches for unsupervised object-centric representation learning are built upon either a stationary observer assumption or a static scene assumption, they often: i) suffer single-view spatial ambiguities, or ii) infer incorrectly or inaccurately object representations from dynamic scenes. To address this, we propose Dynamics-aware Multi-Object Network (DyMON), a method that broadens the scope of multi-view object-centric representation learning to dynamic scenes. We train DyMON on multi-view-dynamic-scene data and show that DyMON learns -- without supervision -- to factorize the entangled effects of observer motions and scene object dynamics from a sequence of observations, and constructs scene object spatial representations suitable for rendering at arbitrary times (querying across time) and from arbitrary viewpoints (querying across space). We also show that the factorized scene representations (w.r.t. objects) support querying about a single object by space and time independently.

In this work we explore how fine-grained differences between the shapes of common objects are expressed in language, grounded on images and 3D models of the objects. We first build a large scale, carefully controlled dataset of human utterances that each refers to a 2D rendering of a 3D CAD model so as to distinguish it from a set of shape-wise similar alternatives. Using this dataset, we develop neural language understanding (listening) and production (speaking) models that vary in their grounding (pure 3D forms via point-clouds vs. rendered 2D images), the degree of pragmatic reasoning captured (e.g. speakers that reason about a listener or not), and the neural architecture (e.g. with or without attention). We find models that perform well with both synthetic and human partners, and with held out utterances and objects. We also find that these models are amenable to zero-shot transfer learning to novel object classes (e.g. transfer from training on chairs to testing on lamps), as well as to real-world images drawn from furniture catalogs. Lesion studies indicate that the neural listeners depend heavily on part-related words and associate these words correctly with visual parts of objects (without any explicit network training on object parts), and that transfer to novel classes is most successful when known part-words are available. This work illustrates a practical approach to language grounding, and provides a case study in the relationship between object shape and linguistic structure when it comes to object differentiation.

Recent development in vision-language approaches has instigated a paradigm shift in learning visual recognition models from language supervision. These approaches align objects with language queries (e.g. "a photo of a cat") and improve the models' adaptability to identify novel objects and domains. Recently, several studies have attempted to query these models with complex language expressions that include specifications of fine-grained semantic details, such as attributes, shapes, textures, and relations. However, simply incorporating language descriptions as queries does not guarantee accurate interpretation by the models. In fact, our experiments show that GLIP, the state-of-the-art vision-language model for object detection, often disregards contextual information in the language descriptions and instead relies heavily on detecting objects solely by their names. To tackle the challenges, we propose a new description-conditioned (DesCo) paradigm of learning object recognition models with rich language descriptions consisting of two major innovations: 1) we employ a large language model as a commonsense knowledge engine to generate rich language descriptions of objects based on object names and the raw image-text caption; 2) we design context-sensitive queries to improve the model's ability in deciphering intricate nuances embedded within descriptions and enforce the model to focus on context rather than object names alone. On two novel object detection benchmarks, LVIS and OminiLabel, under the zero-shot detection setting, our approach achieves 34.8 APr minival (+9.1) and 29.3 AP (+3.6), respectively, surpassing the prior state-of-the-art models, GLIP and FIBER, by a large margin.

We introduce J-ORA, a novel multimodal dataset that bridges the gap in robot perception by providing detailed object attribute annotations within Japanese human-robot dialogue scenarios. J-ORA is designed to support three critical perception tasks, object identification, reference resolution, and next-action prediction, by leveraging a comprehensive template of attributes (e.g., category, color, shape, size, material, and spatial relations). Extensive evaluations with both proprietary and open-source Vision Language Models (VLMs) reveal that incorporating detailed object attributes substantially improves multimodal perception performance compared to without object attributes. Despite the improvement, we find that there still exists a gap between proprietary and open-source VLMs. In addition, our analysis of object affordances demonstrates varying abilities in understanding object functionality and contextual relationships across different VLMs. These findings underscore the importance of rich, context-sensitive attribute annotations in advancing robot perception in dynamic environments. See project page at https://jatuhurrra.github.io/J-ORA/.

Although text-to-image (T2I) models exhibit remarkable generation capabilities, they frequently fail to accurately bind semantically related objects or attributes in the input prompts; a challenge termed semantic binding. Previous approaches either involve intensive fine-tuning of the entire T2I model or require users or large language models to specify generation layouts, adding complexity. In this paper, we define semantic binding as the task of associating a given object with its attribute, termed attribute binding, or linking it to other related sub-objects, referred to as object binding. We introduce a novel method called Token Merging (ToMe), which enhances semantic binding by aggregating relevant tokens into a single composite token. This ensures that the object, its attributes and sub-objects all share the same cross-attention map. Additionally, to address potential confusion among main objects with complex textual prompts, we propose end token substitution as a complementary strategy. To further refine our approach in the initial stages of T2I generation, where layouts are determined, we incorporate two auxiliary losses, an entropy loss and a semantic binding loss, to iteratively update the composite token to improve the generation integrity. We conducted extensive experiments to validate the effectiveness of ToMe, comparing it against various existing methods on the T2I-CompBench and our proposed GPT-4o object binding benchmark. Our method is particularly effective in complex scenarios that involve multiple objects and attributes, which previous methods often fail to address. The code will be publicly available at https://github.com/hutaihang/ToMe.

Access to large and diverse computer-aided design (CAD) drawings is critical for developing symbol spotting algorithms. In this paper, we present FloorPlanCAD, a large-scale real-world CAD drawing dataset containing over 10,000 floor plans, ranging from residential to commercial buildings. CAD drawings in the dataset are all represented as vector graphics, which enable us to provide line-grained annotations of 30 object categories. Equipped by such annotations, we introduce the task of panoptic symbol spotting, which requires to spot not only instances of countable things, but also the semantic of uncountable stuff. Aiming to solve this task, we propose a novel method by combining Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) with Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), which captures both non-Euclidean and Euclidean features and can be trained end-to-end. The proposed CNN-GCN method achieved state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on the task of semantic symbol spotting, and help us build a baseline network for the panoptic symbol spotting task. Our contributions are three-fold: 1) to the best of our knowledge, the presented CAD drawing dataset is the first of its kind; 2) the panoptic symbol spotting task considers the spotting of both thing instances and stuff semantic as one recognition problem; and 3) we presented a baseline solution to the panoptic symbol spotting task based on a novel CNN-GCN method, which achieved SOTA performance on semantic symbol spotting. We believe that these contributions will boost research in related areas.

Humans refer to objects in their environments all the time, especially in dialogue with other people. We explore generating and comprehending natural language referring expressions for objects in images. In particular, we focus on incorporating better measures of visual context into referring expression models and find that visual comparison to other objects within an image helps improve performance significantly. We also develop methods to tie the language generation process together, so that we generate expressions for all objects of a particular category jointly. Evaluation on three recent datasets - RefCOCO, RefCOCO+, and RefCOCOg, shows the advantages of our methods for both referring expression generation and comprehension.

Semantic classes can be either things (objects with a well-defined shape, e.g. car, person) or stuff (amorphous background regions, e.g. grass, sky). While lots of classification and detection works focus on thing classes, less attention has been given to stuff classes. Nonetheless, stuff classes are important as they allow to explain important aspects of an image, including (1) scene type; (2) which thing classes are likely to be present and their location (through contextual reasoning); (3) physical attributes, material types and geometric properties of the scene. To understand stuff and things in context we introduce COCO-Stuff, which augments all 164K images of the COCO 2017 dataset with pixel-wise annotations for 91 stuff classes. We introduce an efficient stuff annotation protocol based on superpixels, which leverages the original thing annotations. We quantify the speed versus quality trade-off of our protocol and explore the relation between annotation time and boundary complexity. Furthermore, we use COCO-Stuff to analyze: (a) the importance of stuff and thing classes in terms of their surface cover and how frequently they are mentioned in image captions; (b) the spatial relations between stuff and things, highlighting the rich contextual relations that make our dataset unique; (c) the performance of a modern semantic segmentation method on stuff and thing classes, and whether stuff is easier to segment than things.

We propose a method that can generate an unambiguous description (known as a referring expression) of a specific object or region in an image, and which can also comprehend or interpret such an expression to infer which object is being described. We show that our method outperforms previous methods that generate descriptions of objects without taking into account other potentially ambiguous objects in the scene. Our model is inspired by recent successes of deep learning methods for image captioning, but while image captioning is difficult to evaluate, our task allows for easy objective evaluation. We also present a new large-scale dataset for referring expressions, based on MS-COCO. We have released the dataset and a toolbox for visualization and evaluation, see https://github.com/mjhucla/Google_Refexp_toolbox

Object models are gradually progressing from predicting just category labels to providing detailed descriptions of object instances. This motivates the need for large datasets which go beyond traditional object masks and provide richer annotations such as part masks and attributes. Hence, we introduce PACO: Parts and Attributes of Common Objects. It spans 75 object categories, 456 object-part categories and 55 attributes across image (LVIS) and video (Ego4D) datasets. We provide 641K part masks annotated across 260K object boxes, with roughly half of them exhaustively annotated with attributes as well. We design evaluation metrics and provide benchmark results for three tasks on the dataset: part mask segmentation, object and part attribute prediction and zero-shot instance detection. Dataset, models, and code are open-sourced at https://github.com/facebookresearch/paco.

Open-vocabulary object detection (OVD), detecting specific classes of objects using only their linguistic descriptions (e.g., class names) without any image samples, has garnered significant attention. However, in real-world applications, the target class concepts is often hard to describe in text and the only way to specify target objects is to provide their image examples, yet it is often challenging to obtain a good number of samples. Thus, there is a high demand from practitioners for few-shot object detection (FSOD). A natural question arises: Can the benefits of OVD extend to FSOD for object classes that are difficult to describe in text? Compared to traditional methods that learn only predefined classes (referred to in this paper as closed-set object detection, COD), can the extra cost of OVD be justified? To answer these questions, we propose a method to quantify the ``text-describability'' of object detection datasets using the zero-shot image classification accuracy with CLIP. This allows us to categorize various OD datasets with different text-describability and emprically evaluate the FSOD performance of OVD and COD methods within each category. Our findings reveal that: i) there is little difference between OVD and COD for object classes with low text-describability under equal conditions in OD pretraining; and ii) although OVD can learn from more diverse data than OD-specific data, thereby increasing the volume of training data, it can be counterproductive for classes with low-text-describability. These findings provide practitioners with valuable guidance amidst the recent advancements of OVD methods.

We introduce ObjectAdd, a training-free diffusion modification method to add user-expected objects into user-specified area. The motive of ObjectAdd stems from: first, describing everything in one prompt can be difficult, and second, users often need to add objects into the generated image. To accommodate with real world, our ObjectAdd maintains accurate image consistency after adding objects with technical innovations in: (1) embedding-level concatenation to ensure correct text embedding coalesce; (2) object-driven layout control with latent and attention injection to ensure objects accessing user-specified area; (3) prompted image inpainting in an attention refocusing & object expansion fashion to ensure rest of the image stays the same. With a text-prompted image, our ObjectAdd allows users to specify a box and an object, and achieves: (1) adding object inside the box area; (2) exact content outside the box area; (3) flawless fusion between the two areas

Although the mapping between sound and meaning in human language is assumed to be largely arbitrary, research in cognitive science has shown that there are non-trivial correlations between particular sounds and meanings across languages and demographic groups, a phenomenon known as sound symbolism. Among the many dimensions of meaning, sound symbolism is particularly salient and well-demonstrated with regards to cross-modal associations between language and the visual domain. In this work, we address the question of whether sound symbolism is reflected in vision-and-language models such as CLIP and Stable Diffusion. Using zero-shot knowledge probing to investigate the inherent knowledge of these models, we find strong evidence that they do show this pattern, paralleling the well-known kiki-bouba effect in psycholinguistics. Our work provides a novel method for demonstrating sound symbolism and understanding its nature using computational tools. Our code will be made publicly available.

We propose an approach for annotating object classes using free-form text written by undirected and untrained annotators. Free-form labeling is natural for annotators, they intuitively provide very specific and exhaustive labels, and no training stage is necessary. We first collect 729 labels on 15k images using 124 different annotators. Then we automatically enrich the structure of these free-form annotations by discovering a natural vocabulary of 4020 classes within them. This vocabulary represents the natural distribution of objects well and is learned directly from data, instead of being an educated guess done before collecting any labels. Hence, the natural vocabulary emerges from a large mass of free-form annotations. To do so, we (i) map the raw input strings to entities in an ontology of physical objects (which gives them an unambiguous meaning); and (ii) leverage inter-annotator co-occurrences, as well as biases and knowledge specific to individual annotators. Finally, we also automatically extract natural vocabularies of reduced size that have high object coverage while remaining specific. These reduced vocabularies represent the natural distribution of objects much better than commonly used predefined vocabularies. Moreover, they feature more uniform sample distribution over classes.

We present a method that can recognize new objects and estimate their 3D pose in RGB images even under partial occlusions. Our method requires neither a training phase on these objects nor real images depicting them, only their CAD models. It relies on a small set of training objects to learn local object representations, which allow us to locally match the input image to a set of "templates", rendered images of the CAD models for the new objects. In contrast with the state-of-the-art methods, the new objects on which our method is applied can be very different from the training objects. As a result, we are the first to show generalization without retraining on the LINEMOD and Occlusion-LINEMOD datasets. Our analysis of the failure modes of previous template-based approaches further confirms the benefits of local features for template matching. We outperform the state-of-the-art template matching methods on the LINEMOD, Occlusion-LINEMOD and T-LESS datasets. Our source code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/nv-nguyen/template-pose

How should language interface with a world model's discrete symbol system? The dominant paradigm -- end-to-end injection of LLM/VLM features into robot world models (RT-2, Octo, PaLM-E) -- implicitly assumes that language gradients can directly shape physical symbol representations. We ask whether this assumption is safe, find that it is not, and characterize the minimal architectural constraint that prevents the failure. Any language gradient entering a Gumbel-softmax-based discrete symbol bottleneck forces a structural trade-off: the vanilla estimator collapses to 2.2/64 symbols (4/5 seeds), while five anti-collapse strategies maintain diversity but fail to learn semantic labels (all <= 9.2% accuracy). No tested GumbelBottleneck variant achieves both objectives simultaneously. Within this family of discrete bottlenecks, the failure is structural rather than a matter of optimization. We characterize a sufficient set of three constraints that prevent the failure: (1) cut the gradient chain (z.detach()), preventing language signals from reaching the symbol bottleneck; (2) provide a gradient-free semantic channel -- a non-parametric Memory Table (Dict[symbol -> Counter[label]], zero parameters, zero gradients) where co-occurrence counting replaces gradient-based binding; (3) handle symbol collisions via DP-Means streaming clustering for automatic sub-cluster splitting. All three layers together achieve 97.2% grounding accuracy vs. 22.2% without Layer 3. Across two experiments spanning 74 independent runs, we demonstrate zero symbol collapse in all 32 seeds, with the blackboard achieving 79-100% semantic binding across three encoder architectures (CNN, V-JEPA 300M, CLIP ViT-L), two environments, and three texture conditions. The fix trains fewer than 2M parameters and requires no LLM fine-tuning.

The remarkable success of Large Language Models (LLMs) and instruction tuning drives the evolution of Vision Language Models (VLMs) towards a versatile general-purpose model. Yet, it remains unexplored whether current VLMs genuinely possess quality object-level image understanding capabilities determined from 'what objects are in the image?' or 'which object corresponds to a specified bounding box?'. Our findings reveal that the image understanding capabilities of current VLMs are strongly correlated with their zero-shot performance on Vision Language (VL) tasks. This suggests that prioritizing basic image understanding is crucial for VLMs to excel at VL tasks. To enhance object-level image understanding, we propose Crayon Large Language and Vision mOdel (CoLLaVO), which incorporates instruction tuning with crayon prompt as a new visual prompt tuning scheme based on panoptic color maps. Furthermore, we present a learning strategy of Dual QLoRA to preserve object-level image understanding without forgetting it during visual instruction tuning, thereby achieving a significant leap in zero-shot numerous VL benchmarks.

We propose the Neuro-Symbolic Concept Learner (NS-CL), a model that learns visual concepts, words, and semantic parsing of sentences without explicit supervision on any of them; instead, our model learns by simply looking at images and reading paired questions and answers. Our model builds an object-based scene representation and translates sentences into executable, symbolic programs. To bridge the learning of two modules, we use a neuro-symbolic reasoning module that executes these programs on the latent scene representation. Analogical to human concept learning, the perception module learns visual concepts based on the language description of the object being referred to. Meanwhile, the learned visual concepts facilitate learning new words and parsing new sentences. We use curriculum learning to guide the searching over the large compositional space of images and language. Extensive experiments demonstrate the accuracy and efficiency of our model on learning visual concepts, word representations, and semantic parsing of sentences. Further, our method allows easy generalization to new object attributes, compositions, language concepts, scenes and questions, and even new program domains. It also empowers applications including visual question answering and bidirectional image-text retrieval.

Humans easily determine which color belongs to which shape in multi-object scenes, an ability known as concept binding. Vision-language embedding models such as CLIP struggle with binding: they recognize individual concepts but fail to represent which concepts form which objects. Although CLIP behaves like a bag-of-concepts model in cross-modal retrieval, object information is recoverable from its image and text embeddings separately. We study this tension through the binding function, which maps concepts to scene embeddings. We find that scene embeddings decompose additively into object representations, explaining why uni-modal probes can recover object information. However, CLIP's binding function is high-complexity, which likely prevents the image and text encoders from learning a shared binding mechanism that generalizes to unseen concept combinations. We then ask whether this limitation is fundamental. We show that it is not. In controlled transformer models trained from scratch, binding generalization emerges with sufficient data coverage. These models learn low-complexity binding functions characterized by multiplicative interactions between concepts, enabling systematic generalization. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/oshapio/binding-concepts-complexity.

Human-object centric video personalization (HOCVP) is a core task within subject-driven video generation. However, existing methods suffer from two key limitations. First, most approaches focusing on inter-subject personalization still struggle to strike a balance between high subject fidelity and accurate interaction patterns between humans and diverse objects, especially when objects represent abstract concepts such as logos. Second, while intra-subject references (e.g., OCR maps, multi-view inputs) are expected to enhance subject fidelity, most existing works lack mechanisms to understand such latent correspondence. To address both challenges, we propose HOMIE, an HOCVP framework that tackles both inter- and intra-subject input settings in a unified manner. Compared to previous approaches, HOMIE proposes a better MLLM integration strategy to extract knowledge of reference-level relationships without compromising the controllability of text encoders or incurring costly re-alignment. Specifically, we introduce global multimodal guidance within self-attention to better align MLLM-derived semantic features with VAE tokens. Furthermore, we propose modality-reference embedding to differentiate tokens from MLLM features and VAE tokens and associate intra-subject reference image tokens. Extensive experiments validate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance across various HOCVP tasks. Project Page: https://yiyangcai.github.io/homie-page.github.io/

Despite recent advances in unified multimodal models for multi-reference image generation, existing benchmarks remain organized around predefined task types (e.g., "subject composition"), which are ill-suited to this combinatorial setting and lead to fragmented coverage, uncontrolled complexity, and little diagnostic value. Recognizing that diverse multi-reference tasks share a common set of atomic operations, we adopt a capability-oriented perspective and formalize four operators: Anchor (f), Disentangle (g), Apply (oplus), and Compose (C). Any multi-reference prompt can then be represented as a compositional formula over these operators, whose structural complexity is quantified by the number of operator slots. Building on this formulation, we construct TRACE-Bench, comprising approximately 1,600 evaluation cases across slot counts 1--8, built from 631 formula templates and around 4,000 reference images spanning diverse artistic styles and real-world subjects. The formula structure directly drives an operator-aligned evaluation protocol for per-capability scoring and a diagnostic tree analysis for recursive failure localization. Evaluating 9 leading models reveals insights invisible to holistic scoring: the primary bottleneck lies in disentanglement (g) and attribute binding (oplus) rather than scene-level composition (C), with even the best model scoring only 0.74 on attribute fidelity. Project page: https://amuseum-whr.github.io/TraceBench

Human reasoning can be understood as a cooperation between the intuitive, associative "System-1" and the deliberative, logical "System-2". For existing System-1-like methods in visual activity understanding, it is crucial to integrate System-2 processing to improve explainability, generalization, and data efficiency. One possible path of activity reasoning is building a symbolic system composed of symbols and rules, where one rule connects multiple symbols, implying human knowledge and reasoning abilities. Previous methods have made progress, but are defective with limited symbols from handcraft and limited rules from visual-based annotations, failing to cover the complex patterns of activities and lacking compositional generalization. To overcome the defects, we propose a new symbolic system with two ideal important properties: broad-coverage symbols and rational rules. Collecting massive human knowledge via manual annotations is expensive to instantiate this symbolic system. Instead, we leverage the recent advancement of LLMs (Large Language Models) as an approximation of the two ideal properties, i.e., Symbols from Large Language Models (Symbol-LLM). Then, given an image, visual contents from the images are extracted and checked as symbols and activity semantics are reasoned out based on rules via fuzzy logic calculation. Our method shows superiority in extensive activity understanding tasks. Code and data are available at https://mvig-rhos.com/symbol_llm.

In daily life, humans utilize hands to manipulate objects. Modeling the shape of objects that are manipulated by the hand is essential for AI to comprehend daily tasks and to learn manipulation skills. However, previous approaches have encountered difficulties in reconstructing the precise shapes of hand-held objects, primarily owing to a deficiency in prior shape knowledge and inadequate data for training. As illustrated, given a particular type of tool, such as a mug, despite its infinite variations in shape and appearance, humans have a limited number of 'effective' modes and poses for its manipulation. This can be attributed to the fact that humans have mastered the shape prior of the 'mug' category, and can quickly establish the corresponding relations between different mug instances and the prior, such as where the rim and handle are located. In light of this, we propose a new method, CHORD, for Category-level Hand-held Object Reconstruction via shape Deformation. CHORD deforms a categorical shape prior for reconstructing the intra-class objects. To ensure accurate reconstruction, we empower CHORD with three types of awareness: appearance, shape, and interacting pose. In addition, we have constructed a new dataset, COMIC, of category-level hand-object interaction. COMIC contains a rich array of object instances, materials, hand interactions, and viewing directions. Extensive evaluation shows that CHORD outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in both quantitative and qualitative measures. Code, model, and datasets are available at https://kailinli.github.io/CHORD.

We present EMMa, an Extensible, Multimodal dataset of Amazon product listings that contains rich Material annotations. It contains more than 2.8 million objects, each with image(s), listing text, mass, price, product ratings, and position in Amazon's product-category taxonomy. We also design a comprehensive taxonomy of 182 physical materials (e.g., Plastic rightarrow Thermoplastic rightarrow Acrylic). Objects are annotated with one or more materials from this taxonomy. With the numerous attributes available for each object, we develop a Smart Labeling framework to quickly add new binary labels to all objects with very little manual labeling effort, making the dataset extensible. Each object attribute in our dataset can be included in either the model inputs or outputs, leading to combinatorial possibilities in task configurations. For example, we can train a model to predict the object category from the listing text, or the mass and price from the product listing image. EMMa offers a new benchmark for multi-task learning in computer vision and NLP, and allows practitioners to efficiently add new tasks and object attributes at scale.

Natural scenes provide us with rich contexts for object recognition and reference. In particular, knowing what type of scene one is looking at generates expectations about which objects will occur, and what their spatial configuration should be. Do Vision-Language Models (VLMs) learn to rely on scene contexts in a similar way, when generating references to objects? To address this question, we introduce the Common Objects Out-of-Context (COOCO) dataset and test to what extent VLMs rely on scene context to refer to objects under different degrees of scene-object congruency, and different perturbations. Our findings show that models leverage scene context adaptively, depending on both the semantic relatedness between object and scene and the level of noise. In particular, models rely more on context under high target-scene congruence or when objects are degraded. Attention analysis reveals that successful object categorisation involves increased focus on the target in mid-level layers, especially under moderate noise, suggesting that VLMs dynamically balance local and contextual information for reference generation. We make our dataset, code and models available at https://github.com/cs-nlp-uu/scenereg{https://github.com/cs-nlp-uu/scenereg}.

Understanding multi-label images remains a challenging task in computer vision. With the rapid progress of vision-language multimodal learning, vision-language models (VLMs) enable zero-shot recognition without labeled data. However, due to their intrinsic design, these models often prioritize the most iconic object and omit other contextual positives. This intrinsic bias conflicts with the nature of multi-label learning, thereby limiting their applicability. In this work, we propose an unsupervised framework that adapts VLMs from iconic recognition toward inclusive understanding, enabling label-free multi-label image recognition. Our approach consists of two key stages, ``cutting'' and ``sewing'': In the cutting stage, we present the multi-sampling response estimator to prevent the model from concentrating only on one single object. In the second sewing stage, the multi-object blend adaptation is introduced to adjust the labels to better conform to the multi-label distribution while preserving the intrinsic characteristics of the original model within only one epoch. Extensive experiments show that our framework significantly outperforms existing unsupervised approaches on four public datasets, even surpassing several representative weakly supervised baselines. These results demonstrate the potential of adapting pre-trained VLMs for more comprehensive visual understanding without manual annotations. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/iCVTEAM/TailorCLIP.

Synthetic image generation has recently experienced significant improvements in domains such as natural image or art generation. However, the problem of figure and diagram generation remains unexplored. A challenging aspect of generating figures and diagrams is effectively rendering readable texts within the images. To alleviate this problem, we present OCR-VQGAN, an image encoder, and decoder that leverages OCR pre-trained features to optimize a text perceptual loss, encouraging the architecture to preserve high-fidelity text and diagram structure. To explore our approach, we introduce the Paper2Fig100k dataset, with over 100k images of figures and texts from research papers. The figures show architecture diagrams and methodologies of articles available at arXiv.org from fields like artificial intelligence and computer vision. Figures usually include text and discrete objects, e.g., boxes in a diagram, with lines and arrows that connect them. We demonstrate the effectiveness of OCR-VQGAN by conducting several experiments on the task of figure reconstruction. Additionally, we explore the qualitative and quantitative impact of weighting different perceptual metrics in the overall loss function. We release code, models, and dataset at https://github.com/joanrod/ocr-vqgan.

Given the central role of charts in scientific, business, and communication contexts, enhancing the chart understanding capabilities of vision-language models (VLMs) has become increasingly critical. A key limitation of existing VLMs lies in their inaccurate visual grounding of infographic elements, including charts and human-recognizable objects (HROs) such as icons and images. However, chart understanding often requires identifying relevant elements and reasoning over them. To address this limitation, we introduce OrionBench, a benchmark designed to support the development of accurate object detection models for charts and HROs in infographics. It contains 26,250 real and 78,750 synthetic infographics, with over 6.9 million bounding box annotations. These annotations are created by combining the model-in-the-loop and programmatic methods. We demonstrate the usefulness of OrionBench through three applications: 1) constructing a Thinking-with-Boxes scheme to boost the chart understanding performance of VLMs, 2) comparing existing object detection models, and 3) applying the developed detection model to document layout and UI element detection.

Set-of-Mark (SoM) Prompting unleashes the visual grounding capability of GPT-4V, by enabling the model to associate visual objects with tags inserted on the image. These tags, marked with alphanumerics, can be indexed via text tokens for easy reference. Despite the extraordinary performance from GPT-4V, we observe that other Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) struggle to understand these visual tags. To promote the learning of SoM prompting for open-source models, we propose a new learning paradigm: "list items one by one," which asks the model to enumerate and describe all visual tags placed on the image following the alphanumeric orders of tags. By integrating our curated dataset with other visual instruction tuning datasets, we are able to equip existing MLLMs with the SoM prompting ability. Furthermore, we evaluate our finetuned SoM models on five MLLM benchmarks. We find that this new dataset, even in a relatively small size (10k-30k images with tags), significantly enhances visual reasoning capabilities and reduces hallucinations for MLLMs. Perhaps surprisingly, these improvements persist even when the visual tags are omitted from input images during inference. This suggests the potential of "list items one by one" as a new paradigm for training MLLMs, which strengthens the object-text alignment through the use of visual tags in the training stage. Finally, we conduct analyses by probing trained models to understand the working mechanism of SoM. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/zzxslp/SoM-LLaVA.

Object appearances change dramatically with pose variations. This creates a challenge for embedding schemes that seek to map instances with the same object ID to locations that are as close as possible. This issue becomes significantly heightened in complex computer vision tasks such as re-identification(reID). In this paper, we suggest that these dramatic appearance changes are indications that an object ID is composed of multiple natural groups, and it is counterproductive to forcefully map instances from different groups to a common location. This leads us to introduce Relation Preserving Triplet Mining (RPTM), a feature-matching guided triplet mining scheme, that ensures that triplets will respect the natural subgroupings within an object ID. We use this triplet mining mechanism to establish a pose-aware, well-conditioned triplet loss by implicitly enforcing view consistency. This allows a single network to be trained with fixed parameters across datasets while providing state-of-the-art results. Code is available at https://github.com/adhirajghosh/RPTM_reid.

We present Pix2Seq, a simple and generic framework for object detection. Unlike existing approaches that explicitly integrate prior knowledge about the task, we cast object detection as a language modeling task conditioned on the observed pixel inputs. Object descriptions (e.g., bounding boxes and class labels) are expressed as sequences of discrete tokens, and we train a neural network to perceive the image and generate the desired sequence. Our approach is based mainly on the intuition that if a neural network knows about where and what the objects are, we just need to teach it how to read them out. Beyond the use of task-specific data augmentations, our approach makes minimal assumptions about the task, yet it achieves competitive results on the challenging COCO dataset, compared to highly specialized and well optimized detection algorithms.

This work studies the problem of panoptic symbol spotting, which is to spot and parse both countable object instances (windows, doors, tables, etc.) and uncountable stuff (wall, railing, etc.) from computer-aided design (CAD) drawings. Existing methods typically involve either rasterizing the vector graphics into images and using image-based methods for symbol spotting, or directly building graphs and using graph neural networks for symbol recognition. In this paper, we take a different approach, which treats graphic primitives as a set of 2D points that are locally connected and use point cloud segmentation methods to tackle it. Specifically, we utilize a point transformer to extract the primitive features and append a mask2former-like spotting head to predict the final output. To better use the local connection information of primitives and enhance their discriminability, we further propose the attention with connection module (ACM) and contrastive connection learning scheme (CCL). Finally, we propose a KNN interpolation mechanism for the mask attention module of the spotting head to better handle primitive mask downsampling, which is primitive-level in contrast to pixel-level for the image. Our approach, named SymPoint, is simple yet effective, outperforming recent state-of-the-art method GAT-CADNet by an absolute increase of 9.6% PQ and 10.4% RQ on the FloorPlanCAD dataset. The source code and models will be available at https://github.com/nicehuster/SymPoint.

Open-Set Object Detection (OSOD) enables recognition of novel categories beyond fixed classes but faces challenges in aligning text representations with complex visual concepts and the scarcity of image-text pairs for rare categories. This results in suboptimal performance in specialized domains or with complex objects. Recent visual-prompted methods partially address these issues but often involve complex multi-modal designs and multi-stage optimizations, prolonging the development cycle. Additionally, effective training strategies for data-driven OSOD models remain largely unexplored. To address these challenges, we propose PET-DINO, a universal detector supporting both text and visual prompts. Our Alignment-Friendly Visual Prompt Generation (AFVPG) module builds upon an advanced text-prompted detector, addressing the limitations of text representation guidance and reducing the development cycle. We introduce two prompt-enriched training strategies: Intra-Batch Parallel Prompting (IBP) at the iteration level and Dynamic Memory-Driven Prompting (DMD) at the overall training level. These strategies enable simultaneous modeling of multiple prompt routes, facilitating parallel alignment with diverse real-world usage scenarios. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that PET-DINO exhibits competitive zero-shot object detection capabilities across various prompt-based detection protocols. These strengths can be attributed to inheritance-based philosophy and prompt-enriched training strategies, which play a critical role in building an effective generic object detector. Project page: https://fuweifuvtoo.github.io/pet-dino.

Existing object detection frameworks are usually built on a single format of object/part representation, i.e., anchor/proposal rectangle boxes in RetinaNet and Faster R-CNN, center points in FCOS and RepPoints, and corner points in CornerNet. While these different representations usually drive the frameworks to perform well in different aspects, e.g., better classification or finer localization, it is in general difficult to combine these representations in a single framework to make good use of each strength, due to the heterogeneous or non-grid feature extraction by different representations. This paper presents an attention-based decoder module similar as that in Transformer~vaswani2017attention to bridge other representations into a typical object detector built on a single representation format, in an end-to-end fashion. The other representations act as a set of key instances to strengthen the main query representation features in the vanilla detectors. Novel techniques are proposed towards efficient computation of the decoder module, including a key sampling approach and a shared location embedding approach. The proposed module is named bridging visual representations (BVR). It can perform in-place and we demonstrate its broad effectiveness in bridging other representations into prevalent object detection frameworks, including RetinaNet, Faster R-CNN, FCOS and ATSS, where about 1.5sim3.0 AP improvements are achieved. In particular, we improve a state-of-the-art framework with a strong backbone by about 2.0 AP, reaching 52.7 AP on COCO test-dev. The resulting network is named RelationNet++. The code will be available at https://github.com/microsoft/RelationNet2.

Attribute detection is crucial for many computer vision tasks, as it enables systems to describe properties such as color, texture, and material. Current approaches often rely on labor-intensive annotation processes which are inherently limited: objects can be described at an arbitrary level of detail (e.g., color vs. color shades), leading to ambiguities when the annotators are not instructed carefully. Furthermore, they operate within a predefined set of attributes, reducing scalability and adaptability to unforeseen downstream applications. We present Compositional Caching (ComCa), a training-free method for open-vocabulary attribute detection that overcomes these constraints. ComCa requires only the list of target attributes and objects as input, using them to populate an auxiliary cache of images by leveraging web-scale databases and Large Language Models to determine attribute-object compatibility. To account for the compositional nature of attributes, cache images receive soft attribute labels. Those are aggregated at inference time based on the similarity between the input and cache images, refining the predictions of underlying Vision-Language Models (VLMs). Importantly, our approach is model-agnostic, compatible with various VLMs. Experiments on public datasets demonstrate that ComCa significantly outperforms zero-shot and cache-based baselines, competing with recent training-based methods, proving that a carefully designed training-free approach can successfully address open-vocabulary attribute detection.

JavaScript Object Notation or JSON is a ubiquitous data exchange format on the Web. Ingesting JSON documents can become a performance bottleneck due to the sheer volume of data. We are thus motivated to make JSON parsing as fast as possible. Despite the maturity of the problem of JSON parsing, we show that substantial speedups are possible. We present the first standard-compliant JSON parser to process gigabytes of data per second on a single core, using commodity processors. We can use a quarter or fewer instructions than a state-of-the-art reference parser like RapidJSON. Unlike other validating parsers, our software (simdjson) makes extensive use of Single Instruction, Multiple Data (SIMD) instructions. To ensure reproducibility, simdjson is freely available as open-source software under a liberal license.

General-purpose object placement is a fundamental capability of an intelligent generalist robot: being capable of rearranging objects following precise human instructions even in novel environments. This work is dedicated to achieving general-purpose object placement with ``something something'' instructions. Specifically, we break the entire process down into three parts, including object localization, goal imagination and robot control, and propose a method named SPORT. SPORT leverages a pre-trained large vision model for broad semantic reasoning about objects, and learns a diffusion-based pose estimator to ensure physically-realistic results in 3D space. Only object types (movable or reference) are communicated between these two parts, which brings two benefits. One is that we can fully leverage the powerful ability of open-set object recognition and localization since no specific fine-tuning is needed for the robotic scenario. Moreover, the diffusion-based estimator only need to ``imagine" the object poses after the placement, while no necessity for their semantic information. Thus the training burden is greatly reduced and no massive training is required. The training data for the goal pose estimation is collected in simulation and annotated by using GPT-4. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. SPORT can not only generate promising 3D goal poses for unseen simulated objects, but also be seamlessly applied to real-world settings.

Multimodal Large Language Models have advanced AI in applications like text-to-video generation and visual question answering. These models rely on visual encoders to convert non-text data into vectors, but current encoders either lack semantic alignment or overlook non-salient objects. We propose the Guiding Visual Encoder to Perceive Overlooked Information (GiVE) approach. GiVE enhances visual representation with an Attention-Guided Adapter (AG-Adapter) module and an Object-focused Visual Semantic Learning module. These incorporate three novel loss terms: Object-focused Image-Text Contrast (OITC) loss, Object-focused Image-Image Contrast (OIIC) loss, and Object-focused Image Discrimination (OID) loss, improving object consideration, retrieval accuracy, and comprehensiveness. Our contributions include dynamic visual focus adjustment, novel loss functions to enhance object retrieval, and the Multi-Object Instruction (MOInst) dataset. Experiments show our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance.

We present FoveaBox, an accurate, flexible, and completely anchor-free framework for object detection. While almost all state-of-the-art object detectors utilize predefined anchors to enumerate possible locations, scales and aspect ratios for the search of the objects, their performance and generalization ability are also limited to the design of anchors. Instead, FoveaBox directly learns the object existing possibility and the bounding box coordinates without anchor reference. This is achieved by: (a) predicting category-sensitive semantic maps for the object existing possibility, and (b) producing category-agnostic bounding box for each position that potentially contains an object. The scales of target boxes are naturally associated with feature pyramid representations. In FoveaBox, an instance is assigned to adjacent feature levels to make the model more accurate.We demonstrate its effectiveness on standard benchmarks and report extensive experimental analysis. Without bells and whistles, FoveaBox achieves state-of-the-art single model performance on the standard COCO and Pascal VOC object detection benchmark. More importantly, FoveaBox avoids all computation and hyper-parameters related to anchor boxes, which are often sensitive to the final detection performance. We believe the simple and effective approach will serve as a solid baseline and help ease future research for object detection. The code has been made publicly available at https://github.com/taokong/FoveaBox .

Referring expressions usually describe an object using properties of the object and relationships of the object with other objects. We propose a technique that integrates context between objects to understand referring expressions. Our approach uses an LSTM to learn the probability of a referring expression, with input features from a region and a context region. The context regions are discovered using multiple-instance learning (MIL) since annotations for context objects are generally not available for training. We utilize max-margin based MIL objective functions for training the LSTM. Experiments on the Google RefExp and UNC RefExp datasets show that modeling context between objects provides better performance than modeling only object properties. We also qualitatively show that our technique can ground a referring expression to its referred region along with the supporting context region.

We present T-Rex2, a highly practical model for open-set object detection. Previous open-set object detection methods relying on text prompts effectively encapsulate the abstract concept of common objects, but struggle with rare or complex object representation due to data scarcity and descriptive limitations. Conversely, visual prompts excel in depicting novel objects through concrete visual examples, but fall short in conveying the abstract concept of objects as effectively as text prompts. Recognizing the complementary strengths and weaknesses of both text and visual prompts, we introduce T-Rex2 that synergizes both prompts within a single model through contrastive learning. T-Rex2 accepts inputs in diverse formats, including text prompts, visual prompts, and the combination of both, so that it can handle different scenarios by switching between the two prompt modalities. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that T-Rex2 exhibits remarkable zero-shot object detection capabilities across a wide spectrum of scenarios. We show that text prompts and visual prompts can benefit from each other within the synergy, which is essential to cover massive and complicated real-world scenarios and pave the way towards generic object detection. Model API is now available at https://github.com/IDEA-Research/T-Rex.

We introduce STRING: Separable Translationally Invariant Position Encodings. STRING extends Rotary Position Encodings, a recently proposed and widely used algorithm in large language models, via a unifying theoretical framework. Importantly, STRING still provides exact translation invariance, including token coordinates of arbitrary dimensionality, whilst maintaining a low computational footprint. These properties are especially important in robotics, where efficient 3D token representation is key. We integrate STRING into Vision Transformers with RGB(-D) inputs (color plus optional depth), showing substantial gains, e.g. in open-vocabulary object detection and for robotics controllers. We complement our experiments with a rigorous mathematical analysis, proving the universality of our methods.

This paper presents a detailed study of improving visual representations for vision language (VL) tasks and develops an improved object detection model to provide object-centric representations of images. Compared to the most widely used bottom-up and top-down model anderson2018bottom, the new model is bigger, better-designed for VL tasks, and pre-trained on much larger training corpora that combine multiple public annotated object detection datasets. Therefore, it can generate representations of a richer collection of visual objects and concepts. While previous VL research focuses mainly on improving the vision-language fusion model and leaves the object detection model improvement untouched, we show that visual features matter significantly in VL models. In our experiments we feed the visual features generated by the new object detection model into a Transformer-based VL fusion model \oscar li2020oscar, and utilize an improved approach \short\ to pre-train the VL model and fine-tune it on a wide range of downstream VL tasks. Our results show that the new visual features significantly improve the performance across all VL tasks, creating new state-of-the-art results on seven public benchmarks. We will release the new object detection model to public.

Generative Vision-Language Models (VLMs) commonly treat bounding-box coordinates as independent output symbols, leaving numerical order and axis semantics implicit. We identify this representation as an important source of error in visual grounding. Hi-Token encodes each coordinate with axis-specific tokens for the hundreds, tens, and ones digits, which adds coarse-to-fine structure and increases token reuse while retaining the existing VLM architecture. Hi-GAR complements this representation with a geometry-based reward for Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), using box overlap and coordinate accuracy at multiple scales. Controlled comparisons under matched training conditions show that Hi-Token improves localization throughout the evaluated IoU range. Hi-GAR further reduces low-overlap predictions and is used only during training. Experiments on three VLM backbones and the RefCOCO family show consistent gains across models and benchmarks. Hi-R1 achieves higher values than strong specialist baselines on most reported metrics. Analyses of token frequency, digit boundaries, object scale, and IoU distributions explain the effects of coordinate representation and reward training. The results show that structured coordinate generation provides an effective approach to generative visual grounding. Project page: https://xyzzzh.github.io/Hi-Token/

Object categories are typically organized into a multi-granularity taxonomic hierarchy. When classifying categories at different hierarchy levels, traditional uni-modal approaches focus primarily on image features, revealing limitations in complex scenarios. Recent studies integrating Vision-Language Models (VLMs) with class hierarchies have shown promise, yet they fall short of fully exploiting the hierarchical relationships. These efforts are constrained by their inability to perform effectively across varied granularity of categories. To tackle this issue, we propose a novel framework (HGCLIP) that effectively combines CLIP with a deeper exploitation of the Hierarchical class structure via Graph representation learning. We explore constructing the class hierarchy into a graph, with its nodes representing the textual or image features of each category. After passing through a graph encoder, the textual features incorporate hierarchical structure information, while the image features emphasize class-aware features derived from prototypes through the attention mechanism. Our approach demonstrates significant improvements on 11 diverse visual recognition benchmarks. Our codes are fully available at https://github.com/richard-peng-xia/HGCLIP.

Large Vision-Language Models (VLMs), such as GPT-4, have achieved remarkable success across various fields. However, there are few studies on 3D indoor scene generation with VLMs. This paper considers this task as a planning problem subject to spatial and layout common sense constraints. To solve the problem with a VLM, we propose a new global-local tree search algorithm. Globally, the method places each object sequentially and explores multiple placements during each placement process, where the problem space is represented as a tree. To reduce the depth of the tree, we decompose the scene structure hierarchically, i.e. room level, region level, floor object level, and supported object level. The algorithm independently generates the floor objects in different regions and supported objects placed on different floor objects. Locally, we also decompose the sub-task, the placement of each object, into multiple steps. The algorithm searches the tree of problem space. To leverage the VLM model to produce positions of objects, we discretize the top-down view space as a dense grid and fill each cell with diverse emojis to make to cells distinct. We prompt the VLM with the emoji grid and the VLM produces a reasonable location for the object by describing the position with the name of emojis. The quantitative and qualitative experimental results illustrate our approach generates more plausible 3D scenes than state-of-the-art approaches. Our source code is available at https://github.com/dw-dengwei/TreeSearchGen .

Vision language models (VLMs) have shown strong zero-shot generalization across various tasks, especially when integrated with large language models (LLMs). However, their ability to comprehend rhetorical and persuasive visual media, such as advertisements, remains understudied. Ads often employ atypical imagery, using surprising object juxtapositions to convey shared properties. For example, Fig. 1 (e) shows a beer with a feather-like texture. This requires advanced reasoning to deduce that this atypical representation signifies the beer's lightness. We introduce three novel tasks, Multi-label Atypicality Classification, Atypicality Statement Retrieval, and Aypical Object Recognition, to benchmark VLMs' understanding of atypicality in persuasive images. We evaluate how well VLMs use atypicality to infer an ad's message and test their reasoning abilities by employing semantically challenging negatives. Finally, we pioneer atypicality-aware verbalization by extracting comprehensive image descriptions sensitive to atypical elements. Our findings reveal that: (1) VLMs lack advanced reasoning capabilities compared to LLMs; (2) simple, effective strategies can extract atypicality-aware information, leading to comprehensive image verbalization; (3) atypicality aids persuasive advertisement understanding. Code and data will be made available.

Understanding how humans conceptualize and categorize natural objects offers critical insights into perception and cognition. With the advent of Large Language Models (LLMs), a key question arises: can these models develop human-like object representations from linguistic and multimodal data? In this study, we combined behavioral and neuroimaging analyses to explore the relationship between object concept representations in LLMs and human cognition. We collected 4.7 million triplet judgments from LLMs and Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) to derive low-dimensional embeddings that capture the similarity structure of 1,854 natural objects. The resulting 66-dimensional embeddings were stable, predictive, and exhibited semantic clustering similar to human mental representations. Remarkably, the dimensions underlying these embeddings were interpretable, suggesting that LLMs and MLLMs develop human-like conceptual representations of objects. Further analysis showed strong alignment between model embeddings and neural activity patterns in brain regions such as EBA, PPA, RSC, and FFA. This provides compelling evidence that the object representations in LLMs, while not identical to human ones, share fundamental similarities that reflect key aspects of human conceptual knowledge. Our findings advance the understanding of machine intelligence and inform the development of more human-like artificial cognitive systems.

Current neural architectures lack a principled way to handle interchangeable tokens, i.e., symbols that are semantically equivalent yet distinguishable, such as bound variables. As a result, models trained on fixed vocabularies often struggle to generalize to unseen symbols, even when the underlying semantics remain unchanged. We propose a novel Transformer-based mechanism that is provably invariant to the renaming of interchangeable tokens. Our approach employs parallel embedding streams to isolate the contribution of each interchangeable token in the input, combined with an aggregated attention mechanism that enables structured information sharing across streams. Experimental results confirm the theoretical guarantees of our method and demonstrate substantial performance gains on open-vocabulary tasks that require generalization to novel symbols. Project page: https://bu-depend-lab.github.io/Symbol-Invariant-Transformer/

Traditional object detection systems are typically constrained to predefined categories, limiting their applicability in dynamic environments. In contrast, open-vocabulary object detection (OVD) enables the identification of objects from novel classes not present in the training set. Recent advances in visual-language modeling have led to significant progress of OVD. However, prior works face challenges in either adapting the single-scale image backbone from CLIP to the detection framework or ensuring robust visual-language alignment. We propose Visual-Language Detection (VLDet), a novel framework that revamps feature pyramid for fine-grained visual-language alignment, leading to improved OVD performance. With the VL-PUB module, VLDet effectively exploits the visual-language knowledge from CLIP and adapts the backbone for object detection through feature pyramid. In addition, we introduce the SigRPN block, which incorporates a sigmoid-based anchor-text contrastive alignment loss to improve detection of novel categories. Through extensive experiments, our approach achieves 58.7 AP for novel classes on COCO2017 and 24.8 AP on LVIS, surpassing all state-of-the-art methods and achieving significant improvements of 27.6% and 6.9%, respectively. Furthermore, VLDet also demonstrates superior zero-shot performance on closed-set object detection.

Many studies in vision tasks have aimed to create effective embedding spaces for single-label object prediction within an image. However, in reality, most objects possess multiple specific attributes, such as shape, color, and length, with each attribute composed of various classes. To apply models in real-world scenarios, it is essential to be able to distinguish between the granular components of an object. Conventional approaches to embedding multiple specific attributes into a single network often result in entanglement, where fine-grained features of each attribute cannot be identified separately. To address this problem, we propose a Conditional Cross-Attention Network that induces disentangled multi-space embeddings for various specific attributes with only a single backbone. Firstly, we employ a cross-attention mechanism to fuse and switch the information of conditions (specific attributes), and we demonstrate its effectiveness through a diverse visualization example. Secondly, we leverage the vision transformer for the first time to a fine-grained image retrieval task and present a simple yet effective framework compared to existing methods. Unlike previous studies where performance varied depending on the benchmark dataset, our proposed method achieved consistent state-of-the-art performance on the FashionAI, DARN, DeepFashion, and Zappos50K benchmark datasets.

Referring expression comprehension (REC) aims to localize a target object in an image described by a referring expression phrased in natural language. Different from the object detection task that queried object labels have been pre-defined, the REC problem only can observe the queries during the test. It thus more challenging than a conventional computer vision problem. This task has attracted a lot of attention from both computer vision and natural language processing community, and several lines of work have been proposed, from CNN-RNN model, modular network to complex graph-based model. In this survey, we first examine the state of the art by comparing modern approaches to the problem. We classify methods by their mechanism to encode the visual and textual modalities. In particular, we examine the common approach of joint embedding images and expressions to a common feature space. We also discuss modular architectures and graph-based models that interface with structured graph representation. In the second part of this survey, we review the datasets available for training and evaluating REC systems. We then group results according to the datasets, backbone models, settings so that they can be fairly compared. Finally, we discuss promising future directions for the field, in particular the compositional referring expression comprehension that requires longer reasoning chain to address.

Hallucination is a common issue in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), yet the underlying principles remain poorly understood. In this paper, we investigate which components of MLLMs contribute to object hallucinations. To analyze image representations while completely avoiding the influence of all other factors other than the image representation itself, we propose a parametric-free representation alignment metric (Pfram) that can measure the similarities between any two representation systems without requiring additional training parameters. Notably, Pfram can also assess the alignment of a neural representation system with the human representation system, represented by ground-truth annotations of images. By evaluating the alignment with object annotations, we demonstrate that this metric shows strong and consistent correlations with object hallucination across a wide range of state-of-the-art MLLMs, spanning various model architectures and sizes. Furthermore, using this metric, we explore other key issues related to image representations in MLLMs, such as the role of different modules, the impact of textual instructions, and potential improvements including the use of alternative visual encoders. Our code is available at: https://github.com/yellow-binary-tree/Pfram.

Learning-based simulation of multi-object rigid-body dynamics remains difficult because contact is discontinuous and errors compound over long horizons. Most existing methods remain tied to mesh connectivity and vertex-level message passing, which limits their applicability to mesh-free inputs such as point clouds and leads to high computational cost. Efficiently modeling high-fidelity rigid-body dynamics from mesh-free representations, therefore, remains challenging. We introduce RigidFormer, an object-centric Transformer-based model that learns mesh-free rigid-body dynamics with controllable integration step sizes. RigidFormer reasons at the object level and advances each object through compact anchors; Anchor-Vertex Pooling enriches these anchors with local vertex features, retaining contact-relevant geometry without dense vertex-level interaction. We propose Anchor-based RoPE to inject anchor geometry into attention while respecting the unordered nature of objects and anchors: object-token processing is permutation-equivariant, and the mean-pooled anchor descriptor is invariant to anchor reindexing while preserving shape extent. RigidFormer further enforces rigidity by projecting updates onto the rigid-body manifold using differentiable Kabsch alignment. On standard benchmarks, RigidFormer outperforms or matches mesh-based baselines using point inputs, runs faster, generalizes to unseen point resolutions and across datasets, and scales to 200+ objects; we also show a preliminary extension to command-conditioned articulated bodies by treating body parts as interacting object-level components.

Motivated by the challenges of the Digital Ancient Near Eastern Studies (DANES) community, we develop digital tools for processing cuneiform script being a 3D script imprinted into clay tablets used for more than three millennia and at least eight major languages. It consists of thousands of characters that have changed over time and space. Photographs are the most common representations usable for machine learning, while ink drawings are prone to interpretation. Best suited 3D datasets that are becoming available. We created and used the HeiCuBeDa and MaiCuBeDa datasets, which consist of around 500 annotated tablets. For our novel OCR-like approach to mixed image data, we provide an additional mapping tool for transferring annotations between 3D renderings and photographs. Our sign localization uses a RepPoints detector to predict the locations of characters as bounding boxes. We use image data from GigaMesh's MSII (curvature, see https://gigamesh.eu) based rendering, Phong-shaded 3D models, and photographs as well as illumination augmentation. The results show that using rendered 3D images for sign detection performs better than other work on photographs. In addition, our approach gives reasonably good results for photographs only, while it is best used for mixed datasets. More importantly, the Phong renderings, and especially the MSII renderings, improve the results on photographs, which is the largest dataset on a global scale.

Foreign Object Debris (FOD) detection has attracted increased attention in the area of machine learning and computer vision. However, a robust and publicly available image dataset for FOD has not been initialized. To this end, this paper introduces an image dataset of FOD, named FOD in Airports (FOD-A). FOD-A object categories have been selected based on guidance from prior documentation and related research by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). In addition to the primary annotations of bounding boxes for object detection, FOD-A provides labeled environmental conditions. As such, each annotation instance is further categorized into three light level categories (bright, dim, and dark) and two weather categories (dry and wet). Currently, FOD-A has released 31 object categories and over 30,000 annotation instances. This paper presents the creation methodology, discusses the publicly available dataset extension process, and demonstrates the practicality of FOD-A with widely used machine learning models for object detection.

State-of-the-art visual grounding models can achieve high detection accuracy, but they are not designed to distinguish between all objects versus only certain objects of interest. In natural language, in order to specify a particular object or set of objects of interest, humans use determiners such as "my", "either" and "those". Determiners, as an important word class, are a type of schema in natural language about the reference or quantity of the noun. Existing grounded referencing datasets place much less emphasis on determiners, compared to other word classes such as nouns, verbs and adjectives. This makes it difficult to develop models that understand the full variety and complexity of object referencing. Thus, we have developed and released the DetermiNet dataset , which comprises 250,000 synthetically generated images and captions based on 25 determiners. The task is to predict bounding boxes to identify objects of interest, constrained by the semantics of the given determiner. We find that current state-of-the-art visual grounding models do not perform well on the dataset, highlighting the limitations of existing models on reference and quantification tasks.

Objects manipulated by the hand (i.e., manipulanda) are particularly challenging to reconstruct from in-the-wild RGB images or videos. Not only does the hand occlude much of the object, but also the object is often only visible in a small number of image pixels. At the same time, two strong anchors emerge in this setting: (1) estimated 3D hands help disambiguate the location and scale of the object, and (2) the set of manipulanda is small relative to all possible objects. With these insights in mind, we present a scalable paradigm for handheld object reconstruction that builds on recent breakthroughs in large language/vision models and 3D object datasets. Our model, MCC-Hand-Object (MCC-HO), jointly reconstructs hand and object geometry given a single RGB image and inferred 3D hand as inputs. Subsequently, we use GPT-4(V) to retrieve a 3D object model that matches the object in the image and rigidly align the model to the network-inferred geometry; we call this alignment Retrieval-Augmented Reconstruction (RAR). Experiments demonstrate that MCC-HO achieves state-of-the-art performance on lab and Internet datasets, and we show how RAR can be used to automatically obtain 3D labels for in-the-wild images of hand-object interactions.

Recent advances in text-to-image model customization have underscored the importance of integrating new concepts with a few examples. Yet, these progresses are largely confined to widely recognized subjects, which can be learned with relative ease through models' adequate shared prior knowledge. In contrast, logos, characterized by unique patterns and textual elements, are hard to establish shared knowledge within diffusion models, thus presenting a unique challenge. To bridge this gap, we introduce the task of logo insertion. Our goal is to insert logo identities into diffusion models and enable their seamless synthesis in varied contexts. We present a novel two-phase pipeline LogoSticker to tackle this task. First, we propose the actor-critic relation pre-training algorithm, which addresses the nontrivial gaps in models' understanding of the potential spatial positioning of logos and interactions with other objects. Second, we propose a decoupled identity learning algorithm, which enables precise localization and identity extraction of logos. LogoSticker can generate logos accurately and harmoniously in diverse contexts. We comprehensively validate the effectiveness of LogoSticker over customization methods and large models such as DALLE~3. https://mingkangz.github.io/logosticker{Project page}.

Localizing objects in image collections without supervision can help to avoid expensive annotation campaigns. We propose a simple approach to this problem, that leverages the activation features of a vision transformer pre-trained in a self-supervised manner. Our method, LOST, does not require any external object proposal nor any exploration of the image collection; it operates on a single image. Yet, we outperform state-of-the-art object discovery methods by up to 8 CorLoc points on PASCAL VOC 2012. We also show that training a class-agnostic detector on the discovered objects boosts results by another 7 points. Moreover, we show promising results on the unsupervised object discovery task. The code to reproduce our results can be found at https://github.com/valeoai/LOST.

We extend Textual Inversion to learn pseudo-words that represent a concept at different resolutions. This allows us to generate images that use the concept with different levels of detail and also to manipulate different resolutions using language. Once learned, the user can generate images at different levels of agreement to the original concept; "A photo of S^*(0)" produces the exact object while the prompt "A photo of S^*(0.8)" only matches the rough outlines and colors. Our framework allows us to generate images that use different resolutions of an image (e.g. details, textures, styles) as separate pseudo-words that can be composed in various ways. We open-soure our code in the following URL: https://github.com/giannisdaras/multires_textual_inversion

Object referring aims to detect all objects in an image that match a given natural language description. We argue that a robust object referring model should be grounded, meaning its predictions should be both explainable and faithful to the visual content. Specifically, it should satisfy two key properties: 1) Verifiable, by producing interpretable reasoning that justifies its predictions and clearly links them to visual evidence; and 2) Trustworthy, by learning to abstain when no object in the image satisfies the given expression. However, most methods treat referring as a direct bounding box prediction task, offering limited interpretability and struggling to reject expressions with no matching object. In this work, we propose Rex-Thinker, a model that formulates object referring as an explicit CoT reasoning task. Given a referring expression, we first identify all candidate object instances corresponding to the referred object category. Rex-Thinker then performs step-by-step reasoning over each candidate to assess whether it matches the given expression, before making a final prediction. To support this paradigm, we construct a large-scale CoT-style referring dataset named HumanRef-CoT by prompting GPT-4o on the HumanRef dataset. Each reasoning trace follows a structured planning, action, and summarization format, enabling the model to learn decomposed, interpretable reasoning over object candidates. We then train Rex-Thinker in two stages: a cold-start supervised fine-tuning phase to teach the model how to perform structured reasoning, followed by GRPO-based RL learning to improve accuracy and generalization. Experiments show that our approach outperforms standard baselines in both precision and interpretability on in-domain evaluation, while also demonstrating improved ability to reject hallucinated outputs and strong generalization in out-of-domain settings.

Open-vocabulary object detection aims to provide object detectors trained on a fixed set of object categories with the generalizability to detect objects described by arbitrary text queries. Previous methods adopt knowledge distillation to extract knowledge from Pretrained Vision-and-Language Models (PVLMs) and transfer it to detectors. However, due to the non-adaptive proposal cropping and single-level feature mimicking processes, they suffer from information destruction during knowledge extraction and inefficient knowledge transfer. To remedy these limitations, we propose an Object-Aware Distillation Pyramid (OADP) framework, including an Object-Aware Knowledge Extraction (OAKE) module and a Distillation Pyramid (DP) mechanism. When extracting object knowledge from PVLMs, the former adaptively transforms object proposals and adopts object-aware mask attention to obtain precise and complete knowledge of objects. The latter introduces global and block distillation for more comprehensive knowledge transfer to compensate for the missing relation information in object distillation. Extensive experiments show that our method achieves significant improvement compared to current methods. Especially on the MS-COCO dataset, our OADP framework reaches 35.6 mAP^{N}_{50}, surpassing the current state-of-the-art method by 3.3 mAP^{N}_{50}. Code is released at https://github.com/LutingWang/OADP.

Retrieval is a fundamental task in multimodal systems: given an image or text query, the goal is to find the most relevant images or texts in a collection, often using a shared embedding space. Reliable retrieval requires these embeddings to capture not only which concepts are present, but also how they are composed. One key compositional challenge is attribute--object binding: encoding which attributes belong to which objects. Existing benchmarks provide a limited view of this capability, typically covering a subset of modality pairings, simple two-object swaps, or small attribute sets. Consequently, it remains unclear how robustly current models preserve attribute--object bindings across different modality pairings and more complex settings. We therefore introduce SABER, a controlled benchmark for evaluating attribute--object binding across all four image and text modality pairings, spanning diverse attribute types and scenes with up to ten objects. Evaluating models on SABER reveals substantial binding failures in both CLIP-style dual encoders and recent MLLM-based embedders. These findings motivate us to ask how binding can be improved efficiently. While multimodal supervision may be effective, collecting suitable images is difficult and costly. Text, on the other hand, is well suited to binding supervision: it is cheap to generate, supports a broader range of attributes and enables precisely controlled hard negatives. We thus finetune an MLLM-based embedder exclusively on synthetic attribute-binding text. Despite the absence of image supervision, the gains transfer to cross-modal and image--image retrieval while preserving general multimodal embedding performance. Our model achieves SOTA results on SABER while also improving on negation and instance-retrieval benchmarks, demonstrating broader benefits of our binding-focused supervision.

Learning primitive (i.e., attribute and object) concepts from seen compositions is the primary challenge of Compositional Zero-Shot Learning (CZSL). Existing CZSL solutions typically rely on oversimplified data assumptions, e.g., modeling each primitive with a single centroid primitive representation, ignoring the natural diversities of the attribute (resp. object) when coupled with different objects (resp. attribute). In this work, we develop ClusPro, a robust clustering-based prototype mining framework for CZSL that defines the conceptual boundaries of primitives through a set of diversified prototypes. Specifically, ClusPro conducts within-primitive clustering on the embedding space for automatically discovering and dynamically updating prototypes. These representative prototypes are subsequently used to repaint a well-structured and independent primitive embedding space, ensuring intra-primitive separation and inter-primitive decorrelation through prototype-based contrastive learning and decorrelation learning. Moreover, ClusPro efficiently performs prototype clustering in a non-parametric fashion without the introduction of additional learnable parameters or computational budget during testing. Experiments on three benchmarks demonstrate ClusPro outperforms various top-leading CZSL solutions under both closed-world and open-world settings.

Learning similarity is a key aspect in medical image analysis, particularly in recommendation systems or in uncovering the interpretation of anatomical data in images. Most existing methods learn such similarities in the embedding space over image sets using a single metric learner. Images, however, have a variety of object attributes such as color, shape, or artifacts. Encoding such attributes using a single metric learner is inadequate and may fail to generalize. Instead, multiple learners could focus on separate aspects of these attributes in subspaces of an overarching embedding. This, however, implies the number of learners to be found empirically for each new dataset. This work, Dynamic Subspace Learners, proposes to dynamically exploit multiple learners by removing the need of knowing apriori the number of learners and aggregating new subspace learners during training. Furthermore, the visual interpretability of such subspace learning is enforced by integrating an attention module into our method. This integrated attention mechanism provides a visual insight of discriminative image features that contribute to the clustering of image sets and a visual explanation of the embedding features. The benefits of our attention-based dynamic subspace learners are evaluated in the application of image clustering, image retrieval, and weakly supervised segmentation. Our method achieves competitive results with the performances of multiple learners baselines and significantly outperforms the classification network in terms of clustering and retrieval scores on three different public benchmark datasets. Moreover, our attention maps offer a proxy-labels, which improves the segmentation accuracy up to 15% in Dice scores when compared to state-of-the-art interpretation techniques.

Visual grounding tasks aim to localize image regions based on natural language references. In this work, we explore whether generative VLMs predominantly trained on image-text data could be leveraged to scale up the text annotation of visual grounding data. We find that grounding knowledge already exists in generative VLM and can be elicited by proper prompting. We thus prompt a VLM to generate object-level descriptions by feeding it object regions from existing object detection datasets. We further propose attribute modeling to explicitly capture the important object attributes, and spatial relation modeling to capture inter-object relationship, both of which are common linguistic pattern in referring expression. Our constructed dataset (500K images, 1M objects, 16M referring expressions) is one of the largest grounding datasets to date, and the first grounding dataset with purely model-generated queries and human-annotated objects. To verify the quality of this data, we conduct zero-shot transfer experiments to the popular RefCOCO benchmarks for both referring expression comprehension (REC) and segmentation (RES) tasks. On both tasks, our model significantly outperform the state-of-the-art approaches without using human annotated visual grounding data. Our results demonstrate the promise of generative VLM to scale up visual grounding in the real world. Code and models will be released.

Learning an egocentric action recognition model from video data is challenging due to distractors (e.g., irrelevant objects) in the background. Further integrating object information into an action model is hence beneficial. Existing methods often leverage a generic object detector to identify and represent the objects in the scene. However, several important issues remain. Object class annotations of good quality for the target domain (dataset) are still required for learning good object representation. Besides, previous methods deeply couple the existing action models and need to retrain them jointly with object representation, leading to costly and inflexible integration. To overcome both limitations, we introduce Self-Supervised Learning Over Sets (SOS), an approach to pre-train a generic Objects In Contact (OIC) representation model from video object regions detected by an off-the-shelf hand-object contact detector. Instead of augmenting object regions individually as in conventional self-supervised learning, we view the action process as a means of natural data transformations with unique spatio-temporal continuity and exploit the inherent relationships among per-video object sets. Extensive experiments on two datasets, EPIC-KITCHENS-100 and EGTEA, show that our OIC significantly boosts the performance of multiple state-of-the-art video classification models.

Text-to-image diffusion models have shown great success in generating high-quality text-guided images. Yet, these models may still fail to semantically align generated images with the provided text prompts, leading to problems like incorrect attribute binding and/or catastrophic object neglect. Given the pervasive object-oriented structure underlying text prompts, we introduce a novel object-conditioned Energy-Based Attention Map Alignment (EBAMA) method to address the aforementioned problems. We show that an object-centric attribute binding loss naturally emerges by approximately maximizing the log-likelihood of a z-parameterized energy-based model with the help of the negative sampling technique. We further propose an object-centric intensity regularizer to prevent excessive shifts of objects attention towards their attributes. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments, including human evaluation, on several challenging benchmarks demonstrate the superior performance of our method over previous strong counterparts. With better aligned attention maps, our approach shows great promise in further enhancing the text-controlled image editing ability of diffusion models.

Every day, humans perceive objects and communicate these perceptions through various channels. In this paper, we present a computational model designed to track and simulate the perception of objects, as well as their representations as conveyed in communication. We delineate two fundamental components of our internal representation, termed "observed" and "seen", which we correlate with established concepts in computer vision, namely encoding and decoding. These components are integrated into semiotic networks, which simulate perceptual inference of object perception and human communication. Our model of object perception by a person allows us to define object perception by {\em a network}. We demonstrate this with an example of an image baseline classifier by constructing a new network that includes the baseline classifier and an additional layer. This layer produces the images "perceived" by the entire network, transforming it into a perceptualized image classifier. This facilitates visualization of the acquired network. Within our network, the image representations become more efficient for classification tasks when they are assembled and randomized. In our experiments, the perceptualized network outperformed the baseline classifier on MNIST training databases consisting of a restricted number of images. Our model is not limited to persons and can be applied to any system featuring a loop involving the processing from "internal" to "external" representations.

Recent works on Generalized Referring Expression Segmentation (GRES) struggle with handling complex expressions referring to multiple distinct objects. This is because these methods typically employ an end-to-end foreground-background segmentation and lack a mechanism to explicitly differentiate and associate different object instances to the text query. To this end, we propose InstAlign, a method that incorporates object-level reasoning into the segmentation process. Our model leverages both text and image inputs to extract a set of object-level tokens that capture both the semantic information in the input prompt and the objects within the image. By modeling the text-object alignment via instance-level supervision, each token uniquely represents an object segment in the image, while also aligning with relevant semantic information from the text. Extensive experiments on the gRefCOCO and Ref-ZOM benchmarks demonstrate that our method significantly advances state-of-the-art performance, setting a new standard for precise and flexible GRES.

Object-centric architectures usually apply a differentiable module to the entire feature map to decompose it into sets of entity representations called slots. Some of these methods structurally resemble clustering algorithms, where the cluster's center in latent space serves as a slot representation. Slot Attention is an example of such a method, acting as a learnable analog of the soft k-means algorithm. Our work employs a learnable clustering method based on the Gaussian Mixture Model. Unlike other approaches, we represent slots not only as centers of clusters but also incorporate information about the distance between clusters and assigned vectors, leading to more expressive slot representations. Our experiments demonstrate that using this approach instead of Slot Attention improves performance in object-centric scenarios, achieving state-of-the-art results in the set property prediction task.

Reliable classification of 3D-printed objects is essential for automating post-production workflows in industrial additive manufacturing. Despite extensive automation in other stages of the printing pipeline, this task still relies heavily on manual inspection, as the set of objects to be classified can change daily, making frequent model retraining impractical. Automating the identification step is therefore critical for improving operational efficiency. A vision model that could classify any set of objects by utilizing their corresponding CAD models and avoiding retraining would be highly beneficial in this setting. To enable systematic evaluation of vision models on this task, we introduce ThingiPrint, a new publicly available dataset that pairs CAD models with real photographs of their 3D-printed counterparts. Using ThingiPrint, we benchmark a range of existing vision models on the task of 3D-printed object classification. We additionally show that contrastive fine-tuning with a rotation-invariant objective allows effective prototype-based classification of previously unseen 3D-printed objects. By relying solely on the available CAD models, this avoids the need for retraining when new objects are introduced. Experiments show that this approach outperforms standard pretrained baselines, suggesting improved generalization and practical relevance for real-world use.

Object hallucination poses a significant challenge in vision-language (VL) models, often leading to the generation of nonsensical or unfaithful responses with non-existent objects. However, the absence of a general measurement for evaluating object hallucination in VL models has hindered our understanding and ability to mitigate this issue. In this work, we present NOPE (Negative Object Presence Evaluation), a novel benchmark designed to assess object hallucination in VL models through visual question answering (VQA). We propose a cost-effective and scalable approach utilizing large language models to generate 29.5k synthetic negative pronoun (NegP) data of high quality for NOPE. We extensively investigate the performance of 10 state-of-the-art VL models in discerning the non-existence of objects in visual questions, where the ground truth answers are denoted as NegP (e.g., "none"). Additionally, we evaluate their standard performance on visual questions on 9 other VQA datasets. Through our experiments, we demonstrate that no VL model is immune to the vulnerability of object hallucination, as all models achieve accuracy below 10\% on NegP. Furthermore, we uncover that lexically diverse visual questions, question types with large scopes, and scene-relevant objects capitalize the risk of object hallucination in VL models.

Image captioning models tend to describe images in an object-centric way, emphasising visible objects. But image descriptions can also abstract away from objects and describe the type of scene depicted. In this paper, we explore the potential of a state-of-the-art Vision and Language model, VinVL, to caption images at the scene level using (1) a novel dataset which pairs images with both object-centric and scene descriptions. Through (2) an in-depth analysis of the effect of the fine-tuning, we show (3) that a small amount of curated data suffices to generate scene descriptions without losing the capability to identify object-level concepts in the scene; the model acquires a more holistic view of the image compared to when object-centric descriptions are generated. We discuss the parallels between these results and insights from computational and cognitive science research on scene perception.

Object detection is a computer vision task that has become an integral part of many consumer applications today such as surveillance and security systems, mobile text recognition, and diagnosing diseases from MRI/CT scans. Object detection is also one of the critical components to support autonomous driving. Autonomous vehicles rely on the perception of their surroundings to ensure safe and robust driving performance. This perception system uses object detection algorithms to accurately determine objects such as pedestrians, vehicles, traffic signs, and barriers in the vehicle's vicinity. Deep learning-based object detectors play a vital role in finding and localizing these objects in real-time. This article discusses the state-of-the-art in object detectors and open challenges for their integration into autonomous vehicles.

We address the task of predicting what parts of an object can open and how they move when they do so. The input is a single image of an object, and as output we detect what parts of the object can open, and the motion parameters describing the articulation of each openable part. To tackle this task, we create two datasets of 3D objects: OPDSynth based on existing synthetic objects, and OPDReal based on RGBD reconstructions of real objects. We then design OPDRCNN, a neural architecture that detects openable parts and predicts their motion parameters. Our experiments show that this is a challenging task especially when considering generalization across object categories, and the limited amount of information in a single image. Our architecture outperforms baselines and prior work especially for RGB image inputs. Short video summary at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P85iCaD0rfc