# Improving Visual Grounding with Visual-Linguistic Verification and Iterative Reasoning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.00272 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.00272/

## Key facts

- Cited by 69 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 44 of its 50 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 Apr 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 44)

- [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)
- [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)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [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)
- [ViLBERT: Pretraining Task-Agnostic Visiolinguistic Representations for Vision-and-Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.02265/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Generation and Comprehension of Unambiguous Object Descriptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.02283/) (2015)
- [MAttNet: Modular Attention Network for Referring Expression Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.08186/) (2018)
- [Stacked Cross Attention for Image-Text Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.08024/) (2018)
- [TransVG: End-to-End Visual Grounding with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08541/) (2021)
- [Modeling Context Between Objects for Referring Expression Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.00525/) (2016)
- [A Fast and Accurate One-Stage Approach to Visual Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.06354/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Learning Two-Branch Neural Networks for Image-Text Matching Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.03470/) (2017)
- [A Real-Time Cross-modality Correlation Filtering Method for Referring Expression Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.07072/) (2019)
- [Dynamic Graph Attention for Referring Expression Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.08164/) (2019)
- [Depth Completion from Sparse LiDAR Data with Depth-Normal Constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.06727/) (2019)
- [Modeling Relationships in Referential Expressions with Compositional Modular Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.09978/) (2016)
- [Neighbourhood Watch: Referring Expression Comprehension via Language-guided Graph Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04794/) (2018)
- [Learning to Compose and Reason with Language Tree Structures for Visual Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.01784/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 69)

- [EarthGPT: A Universal Multi-modal Large Language Model for Multi-sensor Image Comprehension in Remote Sensing Domain](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.16822/) (2024)
- [RSVG: Exploring Data and Models for Visual Grounding on Remote Sensing Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.12634/) (2022)
- [EDA: Explicit Text-Decoupling and Dense Alignment for 3D Visual Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14941/) (2022)
- [Vision-Language Models in Remote Sensing: Current Progress and Future Trends](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.05726/) (2023)
- [Joint Visual Grounding and Tracking with Natural Language Specification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12027/) (2023)
- [TransVG++: End-to-End Visual Grounding with Language Conditioned Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.06619/) (2022)
- [SimVG: A Simple Framework for Visual Grounding with Decoupled Multi-modal Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.17531/) (2024)
- [GPT-4 Enhanced Multimodal Grounding for Autonomous Driving: Leveraging Cross-Modal Attention with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03543/) (2023)
- [Dynamic MDETR: A Dynamic Multimodal Transformer Decoder for Visual Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.13959/) (2022)
- [Unifying Visual and Vision-Language Tracking via Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.11228/) (2024)
- [3DRP-Net: 3D Relative Position-aware Network for 3D Visual Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.13363/) (2023)
- [Shatter and Gather: Learning Referring Image Segmentation with Text Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.15512/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Mono3DVG: 3D Visual Grounding in Monocular Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.08022/) (2023)
- [OmniBind: Teach to Build Unequal-Scale Modality Interaction for Omni-Bind of All](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.16108/) (2024)
- [Visual Position Prompt for MLLM based Visual Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.15426/) (2025)
- [Show Me What and Where has Changed? Question Answering and Grounding for Remote Sensing Change Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.23828/) (2024)
- [SegVG: Transferring Object Bounding Box to Segmentation for Visual Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.03200/) (2024)
- [ScanERU: Interactive 3D Visual Grounding based on Embodied Reference Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13186/) (2023)
- [Visual Grounding with Multi-modal Conditional Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.04999/) (2024)
- [Hierarchical Alignment-enhanced Adaptive Grounding Network for Generalized Referring Expression Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.01416/) (2025)
- [M2IST: Multi-Modal Interactive Side-Tuning for Efficient Referring Expression Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.01131/) (2024)
- [Dr-LLaVA: Visual Instruction Tuning with Symbolic Clinical Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.19567/) (2024)
- [LENS: Multi-level Evaluation of Multimodal Reasoning with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.15616/) (2025)
- [Grounded Image Text Matching with Mismatched Relation Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.01236/) (2023)
- [SwimVG: Step-wise Multimodal Fusion and Adaption for Visual Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.16786/) (2025)
- [OV-VG: A Benchmark for Open-Vocabulary Visual Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.14374/) (2023)
- [MLS-Track: Multilevel Semantic Interaction in RMOT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.12031/) (2024)
- [Visual Grounding with Attention-Driven Constraint Balancing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.03243/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Visual grounding is a task to locate the target indicated by a natural language expression. Existing methods extend the generic object detection framework to this problem. They base the visual grounding on the features from pre-generated proposals or anchors, and fuse these features with the text embeddings to locate the target mentioned by the text. However, modeling the visual features from these predefined locations may fail to fully exploit the visual context and attribute information in the text query, which limits their performance. In this paper, we propose a transformer-based framework for accurate visual grounding by establishing text-conditioned discriminative features and performing multi-stage cross-modal reasoning. Specifically, we develop a visual-linguistic verification module to focus the visual features on regions relevant to the textual descriptions while suppressing the unrelated areas. A language-guided feature encoder is also devised to aggregate the visual contexts of the target object to improve the object's distinctiveness. To retrieve the target from the encoded visual features, we further propose a multi-stage cross-modal decoder to iteratively speculate on the correlations between the image and text for accurate target localization. Extensive experiments on five widely used datasets validate the efficacy of our proposed components and demonstrate state-of-the-art performance. Our code is public at https://github.com/yangli18/VLTVG.