# Visual Grounding with Transformers

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.04281 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.04281/

## Key facts

- Cited by 42 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 49 of its 55 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 May 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 49)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Deformable DETR: Deformable Transformers for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04159/) (2020)
- [YOLOv3: An Incremental Improvement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02767/) (2018)
- [Deformable Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06211/) (2017)
- [Convolutional LSTM Network: A Machine Learning Approach for Precipitation Nowcasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.04214/) (2015)
- [Generalized Intersection over Union: A Metric and A Loss for Bounding Box Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09630/) (2019)
- [Flickr30k Entities: Collecting Region-to-Phrase Correspondences for Richer Image-to-Sentence Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04870/) (2015)
- [Modeling Context in Referring Expressions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.00272/) (2016)
- [Deep Visual-Semantic Alignments for Generating Image Descriptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.2306/) (2014)
- [On Layer Normalization in the Transformer Architecture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.04745/) (2020)
- [Generation and Comprehension of Unambiguous Object Descriptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.02283/) (2015)
- [Image Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05751/) (2018)
- [Multimodal Transformer for Unaligned Multimodal Language Sequences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.00295/) (2019)
- [MAttNet: Modular Attention Network for Referring Expression Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.08186/) (2018)
- [Attention Augmented Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09925/) (2019)
- [MaX-DeepLab: End-to-End Panoptic Segmentation with Mask Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.00759/) (2020)
- [Modeling Context Between Objects for Referring Expression Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.00525/) (2016)
- [Multimodal Compact Bilinear Pooling for Visual Question Answering and Visual Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.01847/) (2016)
- [A Fast and Accurate One-Stage Approach to Visual Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.06354/) (2019)
- [Rethinking Transformer-based Set Prediction for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10881/) (2020)
- [Learning to Assemble Neural Module Tree Networks for Visual Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.03299/) (2018)
- [Improving One-stage Visual Grounding by Recursive Sub-query Construction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.01059/) (2020)
- [Natural Language Object Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.04164/) (2015)
- [Grounding of Textual Phrases in Images by Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.03745/) (2015)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 42)

- [Grounding DINO: Marrying DINO with Grounded Pre-Training for Open-Set Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05499/) (2023)
- [Referring Transformer: A One-step Approach to Multi-task Visual Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03089/) (2021)
- [RSVG: Exploring Data and Models for Visual Grounding on Remote Sensing Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.12634/) (2022)
- [A Survey of Visual Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06091/) (2021)
- [TransVG++: End-to-End Visual Grounding with Language Conditioned Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.06619/) (2022)
- [Local-Global Context Aware Transformer for Language-Guided Video Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09773/) (2022)
- [A Systematic Evaluation of GPT-4V's Multimodal Capability for Medical Image Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.20381/) (2023)
- [SimVG: A Simple Framework for Visual Grounding with Decoupled Multi-modal Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.17531/) (2024)
- [CLIP-VG: Self-paced Curriculum Adapting of CLIP for Visual Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.08685/) (2023)
- [Medical Phrase Grounding with Region-Phrase Context Contrastive Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.07618/) (2023)
- [Dynamic MDETR: A Dynamic Multimodal Transformer Decoder for Visual Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.13959/) (2022)
- [DQ-DETR: Dual Query Detection Transformer for Phrase Extraction and Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.15516/) (2022)
- [Context Disentangling and Prototype Inheriting for Robust Visual Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.11967/) (2023)
- [ChEX: Interactive Localization and Region Description in Chest X-rays](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.15770/) (2024)
- [YORO -- Lightweight End to End Visual Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.07912/) (2022)
- [MedViLaM: A multimodal large language model with advanced generalizability and explainability for medical data understanding and generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.19684/) (2024)
- [Understanding Embodied Reference with Touch-Line Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.05668/) (2022)
- [Learning A Multi-Task Transformer Via Unified And Customized Instruction Tuning For Chest Radiograph Interpretation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.01092/) (2023)
- [WaterVG: Waterway Visual Grounding based on Text-Guided Vision and mmWave Radar](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.12686/) (2024)
- [Uncertainty-aware Medical Diagnostic Phrase Identification and Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.06798/) (2024)
- [Visual Dependency Transformers: Dependency Tree Emerges from Reversed Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03282/) (2023)
- [M2IST: Multi-Modal Interactive Side-Tuning for Efficient Referring Expression Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.01131/) (2024)
- [Self-paced Multi-grained Cross-modal Interaction Modeling for Referring Expression Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.09957/) (2022)
- [Enhancing Visual Grounding and Generalization: A Multi-Task Cycle Training Approach for Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12327/) (2023)
- [SwimVG: Step-wise Multimodal Fusion and Adaption for Visual Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.16786/) (2025)
- [A unified multi-task framework enables interpretable chest radiograph analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.03417/) (2026)
- [DARA: Domain- and Relation-aware Adapters Make Parameter-efficient Tuning for Visual Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.06217/) (2024)
- [SeCG: Semantic-Enhanced 3D Visual Grounding via Cross-modal Graph Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.08182/) (2024)
- [Predicting Physical World Destinations for Commands Given to Self-Driving Cars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.05419/) (2021)
- [Champion Solution for the WSDM2023 Toloka VQA Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.09045/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this paper, we propose a transformer based approach for visual grounding. Unlike previous proposal-and-rank frameworks that rely heavily on pretrained object detectors or proposal-free frameworks that upgrade an off-the-shelf one-stage detector by fusing textual embeddings, our approach is built on top of a transformer encoder-decoder and is independent of any pretrained detectors or word embedding models. Termed VGTR -- Visual Grounding with TRansformers, our approach is designed to learn semantic-discriminative visual features under the guidance of the textual description without harming their location ability. This information flow enables our VGTR to have a strong capability in capturing context-level semantics of both vision and language modalities, rendering us to aggregate accurate visual clues implied by the description to locate the interested object instance. Experiments show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art proposal-free approaches by a considerable margin on five benchmarks while maintaining fast inference speed.