# EAVL: Explicitly Align Vision and Language for Referring Image Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.09779 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09779/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 49 of its 68 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Aug 2023.

## 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)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [Fully Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4038/) (2014)
- [Zero-Shot Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12092/) (2021)
- [ViLBERT: Pretraining Task-Agnostic Visiolinguistic Representations for Vision-and-Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.02265/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Text2Video-Zero: Text-to-Image Diffusion Models are Zero-Shot Video Generators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13439/) (2023)
- [Semantic Image Segmentation with Deep Convolutional Nets and Fully Connected CRFs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.7062/) (2014)
- [MAttNet: Modular Attention Network for Referring Expression Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.08186/) (2018)
- [Dynamic Convolution: Attention over Convolution Kernels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.03458/) (2019)
- [CRIS: CLIP-Driven Referring Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.15174/) (2021)
- [LAVT: Language-Aware Vision Transformer for Referring Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.02244/) (2021)
- [Reinforced Cross-Modal Matching and Self-Supervised Imitation Learning for Vision-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.10092/) (2018)
- [Cross-Modal Self-Attention Network for Referring Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.04745/) (2019)
- [Segmentation from Natural Language Expressions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.06180/) (2016)
- [Modeling Context Between Objects for Referring Expression Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.00525/) (2016)
- [Vision-Language Transformer and Query Generation for Referring Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05565/) (2021)
- [Multi-task Collaborative Network for Joint Referring Expression Comprehension and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.08813/) (2020)
- [Language as Queries for Referring Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.00487/) (2022)
- [Video Generation From Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.00421/) (2017)
- [Referring Transformer: A One-step Approach to Multi-task Visual Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03089/) (2021)
- [SeqTR: A Simple yet Universal Network for Visual Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16265/) (2022)
- [Referring Image Segmentation via Cross-Modal Progressive Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.00514/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Image Segmentation in Foundation Model Era: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.12957/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Referring image segmentation (RIS) aims to segment an object mentioned in natural language from an image. The main challenge is text-to-pixel fine-grained correlation. In the previous methods, the final results are obtained by convolutions with a fixed kernel, which follows a similar pattern as traditional image segmentation. These methods lack explicit alignment of language and vision features in the segmentation stage, resulting in suboptimal correlation. In this paper, we introduce EAVL, a method explicitly aligning vision and language features. In contrast to fixed convolution kernels, we introduce a Vision-Language Aligner that aligns features in the segmentation stage using dynamic convolution kernels based on the input image and sentence. Specifically, we generate multiple queries representing different emphases of language expression. These queries are transformed into a series of query-based convolution kernels, which are applied in the segmentation stage to produce a series of masks. The final result is obtained by aggregating all masks. Our method harnesses the potential of the multi-modal features in the segmentation stage and aligns language features of different emphases with image features to achieve fine-grained text-to-pixel correlation. We surpass previous state-of-the-art methods on RefCOCO, RefCOCO+, and G-Ref by large margins. Additionally, our method is designed to be a generic plug-and-play module for cross-modality alignment in RIS task, making it easy to integrate with other RIS models for substantial performance improvements.