Referring Image Segmentation (RIS) is a challenging task that aims to segment objects in an image based on natural language expressions. While prior studies have predominantly concentrated on improving vision-language interactions and achieving fine-grained localization, a systematic analysis of the fundamental bottlenecks in existing RIS frameworks remains underexplored. To bridge this gap, we propose DeRIS, a novel framework that decomposes RIS into two key components: perception and cognition. This modular decomposition facilitates a systematic analysis of the primary bottlenecks impeding RIS performance. Our findings reveal that the predominant limitation lies not in perceptual deficiencies, but in the insufficient multi-modal cognitive capacity of current models. To mitigate this, we propose a Loopback Synergy mechanism, which enhances the synergy between the perception and cognition modules, thereby enabling precise segmentation while simultaneously improving robust image-text comprehension. Additionally, we analyze and introduce a simple non-referent sample conversion data augmentation to address the long-tail distribution issue related to target existence judgement in general scenarios. Notably, DeRIS demonstrates inherent adaptability to both non- and multi-referents scenarios without requiring specialized architectural modifications, enhancing its general applicability. The codes and models are available at https://github.com/Dmmm1997/DeRIS.
Referring Expression Segmentation (RES) has attracted rising attention, aiming to identify and segment objects based on natural language expressions. While substantial progress has been made in RES, the emergence of Generalized Referring Expression Segmentation (GRES) introduces new challenges by allowing expressions to describe multiple objects or lack specific object references. Existing RES methods, usually rely on sophisticated encoder-decoder and feature fusion modules, and are difficult to generate class prototypes that match each instance individually when confronted with the complex referent and binary labels of GRES. In this paper, reevaluating the differences between RES and GRES, we propose a novel Model with Adaptive Binding Prototypes (MABP) that adaptively binds queries to object features in the corresponding region. It enables different query vectors to match instances of different categories or different parts of the same instance, significantly expanding the decoder's flexibility, dispersing global pressure across all queries, and easing the demands on the encoder. Experimental results demonstrate that MABP significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in all three splits on gRefCOCO dataset. Meanwhile, MABP also surpasses state-of-the-art methods on RefCOCO+ and G-Ref datasets, and achieves very competitive results on RefCOCO. Code is available at https://github.com/buptLwz/MABP
The newly proposed Generalized Referring Expression Segmentation (GRES) amplifies the formulation of classic RES by involving complex multiple/non-target scenarios. Recent approaches address GRES by directly extending the well-adopted RES frameworks with object-existence identification. However, these approaches tend to encode multi-granularity object information into a single representation, which makes it difficult to precisely represent comprehensive objects of different granularity. Moreover, the simple binary object-existence identification across all referent scenarios fails to specify their inherent differences, incurring ambiguity in object understanding. To tackle the above issues, we propose a \textbf{Co}unting-Aware \textbf{H}ierarchical \textbf{D}ecoding framework (CoHD) for GRES. By decoupling the intricate referring semantics into different granularity with a visual-linguistic hierarchy, and dynamic aggregating it with intra- and inter-selection, CoHD boosts multi-granularity comprehension with the reciprocal benefit of the hierarchical nature. Furthermore, we incorporate the counting ability by embodying multiple/single/non-target scenarios into count- and category-level supervision, facilitating comprehensive object perception. Experimental results on gRefCOCO, Ref-ZOM, R-RefCOCO, and RefCOCO benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness and rationality of CoHD which outperforms state-of-the-art GRES methods by a remarkable margin. Code is available at \href{https://github.com/RobertLuo1/CoHD}{here}.
PSALM is a powerful extension of the Large Multi-modal Model (LMM) to address the segmentation task challenges. To overcome the limitation of the LMM being limited to textual output, PSALM incorporates a mask decoder and a well-designed input schema to handle a variety of segmentation tasks. This schema includes images, task instructions, conditional prompts, and mask tokens, which enable the model to generate and classify segmentation masks effectively. The flexible design of PSALM supports joint training across multiple datasets and tasks, leading to improved performance and task generalization. PSALM achieves superior results on several benchmarks, such as RefCOCO/RefCOCO+/RefCOCOg, COCO Panoptic Segmentation, and COCO-Interactive, and further exhibits zero-shot capabilities on unseen tasks, such as open-vocabulary segmentation, generalized referring expression segmentation and video object segmentation, making a significant step towards a GPT moment in computer vision. Through extensive experiments, PSALM demonstrates its potential to transform the domain of image segmentation, leveraging the robust visual understanding capabilities of LMMs as seen in natural language processing. Code and models are available at https://github.com/zamling/PSALM.
Generalized Referring Expression Segmentation (GRES) extends the scope of classic RES to refer to multiple objects in one expression or identify the empty targets absent in the image. GRES poses challenges in modeling the complex spatial relationships of the instances in the image and identifying non-existing referents. Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have recently shown tremendous progress in these complicated vision-language tasks. Connecting Large Language Models (LLMs) and vision models, MLLMs are proficient in understanding contexts with visual inputs. Among them, LISA, as a representative, adopts a special [SEG] token to prompt a segmentation mask decoder, e.g., SAM, to enable MLLMs in the RES task. However, existing solutions to GRES remain unsatisfactory since current segmentation MLLMs cannot correctly handle the cases where users might reference multiple subjects in a singular prompt or provide descriptions incongruent with any image target. In this paper, we propose Generalized Segmentation Vision Assistant (GSVA) to address this gap. Specifically, GSVA reuses the [SEG] token to prompt the segmentation model towards supporting multiple mask references simultaneously and innovatively learns to generate a [REJ] token to reject the null targets explicitly. Experiments validate GSVA's efficacy in resolving the GRES issue, marking a notable enhancement and setting a new record on the GRES benchmark gRefCOCO dataset. GSVA also proves effective across various classic referring segmentation and comprehension tasks.
Referring Expression Segmentation (RES) aims to generate a segmentation mask for the object described by a given language expression. Existing classic RES datasets and methods commonly support single-target expressions only, i.e., one expression refers to one target object. Multi-target and no-target expressions are not considered. This limits the usage of RES in practice. In this paper, we introduce a new benchmark called Generalized Referring Expression Segmentation (GRES), which extends the classic RES to allow expressions to refer to an arbitrary number of target objects. Towards this, we construct the first large-scale GRES dataset called gRefCOCO that contains multi-target, no-target, and single-target expressions. GRES and gRefCOCO are designed to be well-compatible with RES, facilitating extensive experiments to study the performance gap of the existing RES methods on the GRES task. In the experimental study, we find that one of the big challenges of GRES is complex relationship modeling. Based on this, we propose a region-based GRES baseline ReLA that adaptively divides the image into regions with sub-instance clues, and explicitly models the region-region and region-language dependencies. The proposed approach ReLA achieves new state-of-the-art performance on the both newly proposed GRES and classic RES tasks. The proposed gRefCOCO dataset and method are available at https://henghuiding.github.io/GRES.
Referring image segmentation is a fundamental vision-language task that aims to segment out an object referred to by a natural language expression from an image. One of the key challenges behind this task is leveraging the referring expression for highlighting relevant positions in the image. A paradigm for tackling this problem is to leverage a powerful vision-language ("cross-modal") decoder to fuse features independently extracted from a vision encoder and a language encoder. Recent methods have made remarkable advancements in this paradigm by exploiting Transformers as cross-modal decoders, concurrent to the Transformer's overwhelming success in many other vision-language tasks. Adopting a different approach in this work, we show that significantly better cross-modal alignments can be achieved through the early fusion of linguistic and visual features in intermediate layers of a vision Transformer encoder network. By conducting cross-modal feature fusion in the visual feature encoding stage, we can leverage the well-proven correlation modeling power of a Transformer encoder for excavating helpful multi-modal context. This way, accurate segmentation results are readily harvested with a light-weight mask predictor. Without bells and whistles, our method surpasses the previous state-of-the-art methods on RefCOCO, RefCOCO+, and G-Ref by large margins.
Referring image segmentation aims to segment a referent via a natural linguistic expression.Due to the distinct data properties between text and image, it is challenging for a network to well align text and pixel-level features. Existing approaches use pretrained models to facilitate learning, yet separately transfer the language/vision knowledge from pretrained models, ignoring the multi-modal corresponding information. Inspired by the recent advance in Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining (CLIP), in this paper, we propose an end-to-end CLIP-Driven Referring Image Segmentation framework (CRIS). To transfer the multi-modal knowledge effectively, CRIS resorts to vision-language decoding and contrastive learning for achieving the text-to-pixel alignment. More specifically, we design a vision-language decoder to propagate fine-grained semantic information from textual representations to each pixel-level activation, which promotes consistency between the two modalities. In addition, we present text-to-pixel contrastive learning to explicitly enforce the text feature similar to the related pixel-level features and dissimilar to the irrelevances. The experimental results on three benchmark datasets demonstrate that our proposed framework significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art performance without any post-processing. The code will be released.
In this work, we address the challenging task of referring segmentation. The query expression in referring segmentation typically indicates the target object by describing its relationship with others. Therefore, to find the target one among all instances in the image, the model must have a holistic understanding of the whole image. To achieve this, we reformulate referring segmentation as a direct attention problem: finding the region in the image where the query language expression is most attended to. We introduce transformer and multi-head attention to build a network with an encoder-decoder attention mechanism architecture that "queries" the given image with the language expression. Furthermore, we propose a Query Generation Module, which produces multiple sets of queries with different attention weights that represent the diversified comprehensions of the language expression from different aspects. At the same time, to find the best way from these diversified comprehensions based on visual clues, we further propose a Query Balance Module to adaptively select the output features of these queries for a better mask generation. Without bells and whistles, our approach is light-weight and achieves new state-of-the-art performance consistently on three referring segmentation datasets, RefCOCO, RefCOCO+, and G-Ref. Our code is available at https://github.com/henghuiding/Vision-Language-Transformer.
In this paper, we address referring expression comprehension: localizing an image region described by a natural language expression. While most recent work treats expressions as a single unit, we propose to decompose them into three modular components related to subject appearance, location, and relationship to other objects. This allows us to flexibly adapt to expressions containing different types of information in an end-to-end framework. In our model, which we call the Modular Attention Network (MAttNet), two types of attention are utilized: language-based attention that learns the module weights as well as the word/phrase attention that each module should focus on; and visual attention that allows the subject and relationship modules to focus on relevant image components. Module weights combine scores from all three modules dynamically to output an overall score. Experiments show that MAttNet outperforms previous state-of-art methods by a large margin on both bounding-box-level and pixel-level comprehension tasks. Demo and code are provided.