Vision-and-language models trained to match images with text can be combined with visual explanation methods to point to the locations of specific objects in an image. Our work shows that the localization - “grounding”- abilities of these models can be further improved by fine-tuning for self-consistent visual explanations. We propose a strategy for augmenting existing text-image datasets with paraphrases using a large language model, and SelfEQ, a weakly-supervised strategy on visual explanation maps for paraphrases that encourages self-consistency. Specifically, for an input textual phrase, we attempt to generate a paraphrase and finetune the model so that the phrase and paraphrase map to the same region in the image. We posit that this both expands the vocabulary that the model is able to handle, and improves the quality of the object locations highlighted by gradient-based visual explanation methods (e.g. GradCAM). We demonstrate that SelfEQ improves performance on Flickr30k, ReferIt, and RefCOCO+ over a strong baseline method and several prior works. Particularly, comparing to other methods that do not use any type of box annotations, we obtain 84.07% on Flickr30k (an absolute improvement of 4.69%), 67.40% on ReferIt (an absolute improvement of 7.68%), and 75.10%, 55.49% on RefCOCO+ test sets A and B respectively (an absolute improvement of 3.74% on average).

Existing camouflaged object detection (COD) methods rely heavily on large-scale datasets with pixel-wise annotations. However, due to the ambiguous boundary, annotating camouflage objects pixel-wisely is very time-consuming and labor-intensive, taking ~60mins to label one image. In this paper, we propose the first weakly-supervised COD method, using scribble annotations as supervision. To achieve this, we first relabel 4,040 images in existing camouflaged object datasets with scribbles, which takes ~10s to label one image. As scribble annotations only describe the primary structure of objects without details, for the network to learn to localize the boundaries of camouflaged objects, we propose a novel consistency loss composed of two parts: a cross-view loss to attain reliable consistency over different images, and an inside-view loss to maintain consistency inside a single prediction map. Besides, we observe that humans use semantic information to segment regions near the boundaries of camouflaged objects. Hence, we further propose a feature-guided loss, which includes visual features directly extracted from images and semantically significant features captured by the model. Finally, we propose a novel network for COD via scribble learning on structural information and semantic relations. Our network has two novel modules: the local-context contrasted (LCC) module, which mimics visual inhibition to enhance image contrast/sharpness and expand the scribbles into potential camouflaged regions, and the logical semantic relation (LSR) module, which analyzes the semantic relation to determine the regions representing the camouflaged object. Experimental results show that our model outperforms relevant SOTA methods on three COD benchmarks with an average improvement of 11.0% on MAE, 3.2% on S-measure, 2.5% on E-measure, and 4.4% on weighted F-measure.

We present HetNet (Multi-level Heterogeneous Network), a highly efficient mirror detection network. Current mirror detection methods focus more on performance than efficiency, limiting the real-time applications (such as drones). Their lack of efficiency is aroused by the common design of adopting homogeneous modules at different levels, which ignores the difference between different levels of features. In contrast, HetNet detects potential mirror regions initially through low-level understandings (e.g., intensity contrasts) and then combines with high-level understandings (contextual discontinuity for instance) to finalize the predictions. To perform accurate yet efficient mirror detection, HetNet follows an effective architecture that obtains specific information at different stages to detect mirrors. We further propose a multi-orientation intensity-based contrasted module (MIC) and a reflection semantic logical module (RSL), equipped on HetNet, to predict potential mirror regions by low-level understandings and analyze semantic logic in scenarios by high-level understandings, respectively. Compared to the state-of-the-art method, HetNet runs 664% faster and draws an average performance gain of 8.9% on MAE, 3.1% on IoU, and 2.0% on F-measure on two mirror detection benchmarks. The code is available at https://github.com/Catherine-R-He/HetNet.