Generalized visual grounding tasks, including Generalized Referring Expression Comprehension (GREC) and Segmentation (GRES), extend the classical visual grounding paradigm by accommodating multi-target and non-target scenarios. Specifically, GREC focuses on accurately identifying all referential objects at the coarse bounding box level, while GRES aims for achieve fine-grained pixel-level perception. However, existing approaches typically treat these tasks independently, overlooking the benefits of jointly training GREC and GRES to ensure consistent multi-granularity predictions and streamline the overall process. Moreover, current methods often treat GRES as a semantic segmentation task, neglecting the crucial role of instance-aware capabilities and the necessity of ensuring consistent predictions between instance-level boxes and masks. To address these limitations, we propose InstanceVG, a multi-task generalized visual grounding framework equipped with instance-aware capabilities, which leverages instance queries to unify the joint and consistency predictions of instance-level boxes and masks. To the best of our knowledge, InstanceVG is the first framework to simultaneously tackle both GREC and GRES while incorporating instance-aware capabilities into generalized visual grounding. To instantiate the framework, we assign each instance query a prior reference point, which also serves as an additional basis for target matching. This design facilitates consistent predictions of points, boxes, and masks for the same instance. Extensive experiments obtained on ten datasets across four tasks demonstrate that InstanceVG achieves state-of-the-art performance, significantly surpassing the existing methods in various evaluation metrics. The code and model will be publicly available at https://github.com/Dmmm1997/InstanceVG.

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.

Accurate localization using visual information is a critical yet challenging task, especially in urban environments where nearby buildings and construction sites significantly degrade GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite System) signal quality. This issue underscores the importance of visual localization techniques in scenarios where GNSS signals are unreliable. This paper proposes U-ViLAR, a novel uncertainty-aware visual localization framework designed to address these challenges while enabling adaptive localization using high-definition (HD) maps or navigation maps. Specifically, our method first extracts features from the input visual data and maps them into Bird's-Eye-View (BEV) space to enhance spatial consistency with the map input. Subsequently, we introduce: a) Perceptual Uncertainty-guided Association, which mitigates errors caused by perception uncertainty, and b) Localization Uncertainty-guided Registration, which reduces errors introduced by localization uncertainty. By effectively balancing the coarse-grained large-scale localization capability of association with the fine-grained precise localization capability of registration, our approach achieves robust and accurate localization. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple localization tasks. Furthermore, our model has undergone rigorous testing on large-scale autonomous driving fleets and has demonstrated stable performance in various challenging urban scenarios.

The autoregressive world model exhibits robust generalization capabilities in vectorized scene understanding but encounters difficulties in deriving actions due to insufficient uncertainty modeling and self-delusion. In this paper, we explore the feasibility of deriving decisions from an autoregres-sive world model by addressing these challenges through the formulation of multiple probabilistic hypotheses. We propose LatentDriver, a framework models the environment's next states and the ego vehicle's possible actions as a mixture distribution, from which a deterministic control signal is then derived. By incorporating mixture modeling, the stochastic nature of decision-making is captured. Additionally, the self-delusion problem is mitigated by providing intermediate actions sampled from a distribution to the world model. Experimen-tal results on the recently released closed-loop benchmark Waymax demonstrate that LatentDriver surpasses state-of-the-art reinforcement learning and imitation learning methods, achieving expert-level performance. The code and models will be made available at https://github.com/Sephirex-X/LatentDriver.

In this paper, we study the problem of end-to-end multi-person pose estimation. State-of-the-art solutions adopt the DETR-like framework, and mainly develop the complex decoder, e.g., regarding pose estimation as keypoint box detection and combining with human detection in ED-Pose [38], hierarchically predicting with pose decoder and joint (keypoint) decoder in PETR [27].We present a simple yet effective transformer approach, named Group Pose. We simply regard K-keypoint pose estimation as predicting a set of N × K keypoint positions, each from a keypoint query, as well as representing each pose with an instance query for scoring N pose predictions.Motivated by the intuition that the interaction, among across-instance queries of different types, is not directly helpful, we make a simple modification to decoder self-attention. We replace single self-attention over all the N × (K + 1) queries with two subsequent group self-attentions: (i) N within-instance self-attention, with each over K keypoint queries and one instance query, and (ii) (K +1) same-type across-instance self-attention, each over N queries of the same type. The resulting decoder removes the interaction among across-instance type-different queries, easing the optimization and thus improving the performance. Experimental results on MS COCO and Crowd-Pose show that our approach without human box supervision is superior to previous methods with complex decoders, and even is slightly better than ED-Pose that uses human box supervision. Paddle1and PyTorch2codes are available.

Learning fine-grained interplay between vision and language contributes to a more accurate understanding for Vision-Language tasks. However, it remains challenging to extract key image regions according to the texts for semantic alignments. Most existing works are either limited by text-agnostic and redundant regions obtained with the frozen region proposal module, or failing to scale further due to their heavy reliance on scarce grounding (gold) data to pre-train detectors. To solve these problems, we propose Self-Locator Aided Network (SLAN) for vision-language understanding tasks without any extra gold data. SLAN consists of a region filter and a region adaptor to localize regions of interest conditioned on different texts. By aggregating vision-language information, the region filter selects key regions and the region adaptor updates their coordinates with text guidance. With detailed region-word alignments, SLAN can be easily generalized to many downstream tasks. It achieves fairly competitive results on five vision-language understanding tasks (e.g., 85.7% and 69.2% on COCO image-to-text and text-to-image retrieval, surpassing previous SOTA methods). SLAN also demonstrates strong zero-shot and fine-tuned transferability to two localization tasks. The code is available at https://github.com/scok30/SLAN.

We explore the potential of pooling techniques on the task of salient object detection by expanding its role in convolutional neural networks. In general, two pooling-based modules are proposed. A global guidance module (GGM) is first built based on the bottom-up pathway of the U-shape architecture, which aims to guide the location information of the potential salient objects into layers at different feature levels. A feature aggregation module (FAM) is further designed to seamlessly fuse the coarse-level semantic information with the fine-level features in the top-down pathway. We can progressively refine the high-level semantic features with these two modules and obtain detail enriched saliency maps. Experimental results show that our proposed approach can locate the salient objects more accurately with sharpened details and substantially improve the performance compared with the existing state-of-the-art methods. Besides, our approach is fast and can run at a speed of 53 FPS when processing a 300 ×400 image. To make our approach better applied to mobile applications, we take MobileNetV2 as our backbone and re-tailor the structure of our pooling-based modules. Our mobile version model achieves a running speed of 66 FPS yet still performs better than most existing state-of-the-art methods. To verify the generalization ability of the proposed method, we apply it to the edge detection, RGB-D salient object detection, and camouflaged object detection tasks, and our method achieves better results than the corresponding state-of-the-art methods of these three tasks. Code can be found at http://mmcheng.net/poolnet/.

Humans can naturally and effectively find salient regions in complex scenes. Motivated by this observation, attention mechanisms were introduced into computer vision with the aim of imitating this aspect of the human visual system. Such an attention mechanism can be regarded as a dynamic weight adjustment process based on features of the input image. Attention mechanisms have achieved great success in many visual tasks, including image classification, object detection, semantic segmentation, video understanding, image generation, 3D vision, multimodal tasks, and self-supervised learning. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive review of various attention mechanisms in computer vision and categorize them according to approach, such as channel attention, spatial attention, temporal attention, and branch attention; a related repository https://github.com/MenghaoGuo/Awesome-Vision-Attentions is dedicated to collecting related work. We also suggest future directions for attention mechanism research.

The U-shape structure has shown its advantage in salient object detection for efficiently combining multi-scale features. However, most existing U-shape-based methods focused on improving the bottom-up and top-down pathways while ignoring the connections between them. This paper shows that we can achieve the cross-scale information interaction by centralizing these connections, hence obtaining semantically stronger and positionally more precise features. To inspire the newly proposed strategy's potential, we further design a relative global calibration module that can simultaneously process multi-scale inputs without spatial interpolation. Our approach can aggregate features more effectively while introducing only a few additional parameters. Our approach can cooperate with various existing U-shape-based salient object detection methods by substituting the connections between the bottom-up and top-down pathways. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed approach performs favorably against the previous state-of-the-arts on five widely used benchmarks with less computational complexity. The source code will be publicly available.

Recent advances on CNNs are mostly devoted to designing more complex architectures to enhance their representation learning capacity. In this paper, we consider how to improve the basic convolutional feature transformation process of CNNs without tuning the model architectures. To this end, we present a novel self-calibrated convolutions that explicitly expand fields-of-view of each convolutional layers through internal communications and hence enrich the output features. In particular, unlike the standard convolutions that fuse spatial and channel-wise information using small kernels (e.g., 3×3), self-calibrated convolutions adaptively build long-range spatial and inter-channel dependencies around each spatial location through a novel self-calibration operation. Thus, it can help CNNs generate more discriminative representations by explicitly incorporating richer information. Our self-calibrated convolution design is simple and generic, and can be easily applied to augment standard convolutional layers without introducing extra parameters and complexity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that when applying self-calibrated convolutions into different backbones, our networks can significantly improve the baseline models in a variety of vision tasks, including image recognition, object detection, instance segmentation, and keypoint detection, with no need to change the network architectures. We hope this work could provide a promising way for future research in designing novel convolutional feature transformations for improving convolutional networks. Code is available on the project page.

Salient object segmentation, edge detection, and skeleton extraction are three contrasting low-level pixel-wise vision problems, where existing works mostly focused on designing tailored methods for each individual task. However, it is inconvenient and inefficient to store a pre-trained model for each task and perform multiple different tasks in sequence. There are methods that solve specific related tasks jointly but require datasets with different types of annotations supported at the same time. In this paper, we first show some similarities shared by these tasks and then demonstrate how they can be leveraged for developing a unified framework that can be trained end-to-end. In particular, we introduce a selective integration module that allows each task to dynamically choose features at different levels from the shared backbone based on its own characteristics. Furthermore, we design a task-adaptive attention module, aiming at intelligently allocating information for different tasks according to the image content priors. To evaluate the performance of our proposed network on these tasks, we conduct exhaustive experiments on multiple representative datasets. We will show that though these tasks are naturally quite different, our network can work well on all of them and even perform better than current single-purpose state-of-the-art methods. In addition, we also conduct adequate ablation analyses that provide a full understanding of the design principles of the proposed framework. To facilitate future research, source code will be released.

We solve the problem of salient object detection by investigating how to expand the role of pooling in convolutional neural networks. Based on the U-shape architecture, we first build a global guidance module (GGM) upon the bottom-up pathway, aiming at providing layers at different feature levels the location information of potential salient objects. We further design a feature aggregation module (FAM) to make the coarse-level semantic information well fused with the fine-level features from the top-down path- way. By adding FAMs after the fusion operations in the top-down pathway, coarse-level features from the GGM can be seamlessly merged with features at various scales. These two pooling-based modules allow the high-level semantic features to be progressively refined, yielding detail enriched saliency maps. Experiment results show that our proposed approach can more accurately locate the salient objects with sharpened details and hence substantially improve the performance compared to the previous state-of-the-arts. Our approach is fast as well and can run at a speed of more than 30 FPS when processing a 300×400 image. Code can be found at http://mmcheng.net/poolnet/.

Fully convolutional neural networks (FCNs) have shown their advantages in the salient object detection task. However, most existing FCNs-based methods still suffer from coarse object boundaries. In this paper, to solve this problem, we focus on the complementarity between salient edge information and salient object information. Accordingly, we present an edge guidance network (EGNet) for salient object detection with three steps to simultaneously model these two kinds of complementary information in a single network. In the first step, we extract the salient object features by a progressive fusion way. In the second step, we integrate the local edge information and global location information to obtain the salient edge features. Finally, to sufficiently leverage these complementary features, we couple the same salient edge features with salient object features at various resolutions. Benefiting from the rich edge information and location information in salient edge features, the fused features can help locate salient objects, especially their boundaries more accurately. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method performs favorably against the state-of-the-art methods on six widely used datasets without any pre-processing and post-processing. The source code is available at http: //mmcheng.net/egnet/.