mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

GREC: Generalized Referring Expression Comprehension

arXiv 2308.16182 ↗First posted 30 Aug 2023cs.CVcited by 42

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Abstract (arXiv)

The objective of Classic Referring Expression Comprehension (REC) is to produce a bounding box corresponding to the object mentioned in a given textual description. Commonly, existing datasets and techniques in classic REC are tailored for expressions that pertain to a single target, meaning a sole expression is linked to one specific object. Expressions that refer to multiple targets or involve no specific target have not been taken into account. This constraint hinders the practical applicability of REC. This study introduces a new benchmark termed as Generalized Referring Expression Comprehension (GREC). This benchmark extends the classic REC by permitting expressions to describe any number of target objects. To achieve this goal, we have built the first large-scale GREC dataset named gRefCOCO. This dataset encompasses a range of expressions: those referring to multiple targets, expressions with no specific target, and the single-target expressions. The design of GREC and gRefCOCO ensures smooth compatibility with classic REC. The proposed gRefCOCO dataset, a GREC method implementation code, and GREC evaluation code are available at https://github.com/henghuiding/gRefCOCO.

Key facts. Cited by 42 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 35 of its 41 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 30 Aug 2023.

Builds on

35 of 41 references.

References · 35

  1. 2014Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Contextcited by 17,608
  2. 2023Grounding DINO: Marrying DINO with Grounded Pre-Training for Open-Set Object Detectioncited by 3,332
  3. 2016Visual Genome: Connecting Language and Vision Using Crowdsourced Dense Image Annotationscited by 2,656
  4. 2016Modeling Context in Referring Expressionscited by 1,063
  5. 2015Generation and Comprehension of Unambiguous Object Descriptionscited by 904
  6. 2021MDETR -- Modulated Detection for End-to-End Multi-Modal Understandingcited by 819
  7. 2021TransVG: End-to-End Visual Grounding with Transformerscited by 271
  8. 2023GRES: Generalized Referring Expression Segmentationcited by 254
  9. 2021Vision-Language Transformer and Query Generation for Referring Segmentationcited by 240
  10. 2023MOSE: A New Dataset for Video Object Segmentation in Complex Scenescited by 234
  11. 2023MeViS: A Large-scale Benchmark for Video Segmentation with Motion Expressionscited by 228
  12. 2020Multi-task Collaborative Network for Joint Referring Expression Comprehension and Segmentationcited by 204
23 more
  1. 2019A Fast and Accurate One-Stage Approach to Visual Groundingcited by 195
  2. 2023Universal Instance Perception as Object Discovery and Retrievalcited by 192
  3. 2023Towards Open Vocabulary Learning: A Surveycited by 166
  4. 2018Learning to Assemble Neural Module Tree Networks for Visual Groundingcited by 140
  5. 2020Improving One-stage Visual Grounding by Recursive Sub-query Constructioncited by 138
  6. 2015Natural Language Object Retrievalcited by 124
  7. 2023Transformer-Based Visual Segmentation: A Surveycited by 124
  8. 2020PhraseCut: Language-based Image Segmentation in the Wildcited by 116
  9. 2019A Real-Time Cross-modality Correlation Filtering Method for Referring Expression Comprehensioncited by 111
  10. 2022VLT: Vision-Language Transformer and Query Generation for Referring Segmentationcited by 111
  11. 2016Modeling Relationships in Referential Expressions with Compositional Modular Networkscited by 106
  12. 2018Neighbourhood Watch: Referring Expression Comprehension via Language-guided Graph Attention Networkscited by 102
  13. 2019Learning to Compose and Reason with Language Tree Structures for Visual Groundingcited by 98
  14. 2017Grounding Referring Expressions in Images by Variational Contextcited by 82
  15. 2017Parallel Attention: A Unified Framework for Visual Object Discovery through Dialogs and Queriescited by 56
  16. 2018Real-Time Referring Expression Comprehension by Single-Stage Grounding Networkcited by 56
  17. 2022Towards Robust Referring Image Segmentationcited by 49
  18. 2022Instance-Specific Feature Propagation for Referring Segmentationcited by 45
  19. 2023Global Knowledge Calibration for Fast Open-Vocabulary Segmentationcited by 40
  20. 2023Multi-Modal Mutual Attention and Iterative Interaction for Referring Image Segmentationcited by 36
  21. 2023Betrayed by Captions: Joint Caption Grounding and Generation for Open Vocabulary Instance Segmentationcited by 28
  22. 2023Primitive Generation and Semantic-related Alignment for Universal Zero-Shot Segmentationcited by 28
  23. 2023Semantic-Promoted Debiasing and Background Disambiguation for Zero-Shot Instance Segmentationcited by 16

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Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2023: 2; 2024: 7; 2025: 20; 2026: 13.

42 papers.

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  1. 2025Your Large Vision-Language Model Only Needs A Few Attention Heads For Visual Groundingcited by 83
  2. 2025Vision-R1: Evolving Human-Free Alignment in Large Vision-Language Models via Vision-Guided Reinforcement Learningcited by 69
  3. 2023Jack of All Tasks, Master of Many: Designing General-purpose Coarse-to-Fine Vision-Language Modelcited by 53
  4. 2024Toward Visual Grounding: A Surveycited by 52
  5. 2024VoCoT: Unleashing Visually Grounded Multi-Step Reasoning in Large Multi-Modal Modelscited by 43
  6. 2024SimVG: A Simple Framework for Visual Grounding with Decoupled Multi-modal Fusioncited by 36
  7. 2025Multimodal Referring Segmentation: A Surveycited by 22
  8. 2025Geo-R1: Improving Few-Shot Geospatial Referring Expression Understanding with Reinforcement Fine-Tuningcited by 20
  9. 2023InstructDET: Diversifying Referring Object Detection with Generalized Instructionscited by 16
  10. 2025DeRIS: Decoupling Perception and Cognition for Enhanced Referring Image Segmentation through Loopback Synergycited by 13
  11. 2025RefChartQA: Grounding Visual Answer on Chart Images through Instruction Tuningcited by 11
  12. 2025PropVG: End-to-End Proposal-Driven Visual Grounding with Multi-Granularity Discriminationcited by 10
30 more
  1. 2025Towards Understanding Visual Grounding in Visual Language Modelscited by 10
  2. 2025TACO: Think-Answer Consistency for Optimized Long-Chain Reasoning and Efficient Data Learning via Reinforcement Learning in LVLMscited by 9
  3. 2024ActionVOS: Actions as Prompts for Video Object Segmentationcited by 8
  4. 2024LSVOS Challenge Report: Large-scale Complex and Long Video Object Segmentationcited by 8
  5. 2025Improving Generalized Visual Grounding with Instance-aware Joint Learningcited by 8
  6. 2026Beyond Unimodal Shortcuts: MLLMs as Cross-Modal Reasoners for Grounded Named Entity Recognitioncited by 6
  7. 2026InstructSAM: Segment Any Instance with Any Instructionscited by 6
  8. 2025PVUW 2025 Challenge Report: Advances in Pixel-level Understanding of Complex Videos in the Wildcited by 5
  9. 2025LSVOS 2025 Challenge Report: Recent Advances in Complex Video Object Segmentationcited by 4
  10. 2024Griffon-G: Bridging Vision-Language and Vision-Centric Tasks via Large Multimodal Modelscited by 3
  11. 2025Understand, Think, and Answer: Advancing Visual Reasoning with Large Multimodal Modelscited by 3
  12. 2026Multi-label Instance-level Generalised Visual Grounding in Agriculturecited by 2
  13. 2024RefHCM: A Unified Model for Referring Perceptions in Human-Centric Scenarioscited by 1
  14. 2025Synthetic Object Compositions for Scalable and Accurate Learning in Detection, Segmentation, and Groundingcited by 1
  15. 2025Comprehension of Multilingual Expressions Referring to Target Objects in Visual Inputscited by 1
  16. 2025LIHE: Linguistic Instance-Split Hyperbolic-Euclidean Framework for Generalized Weakly-Supervised Referring Expression Comprehensioncited by 1
  17. 2025Generalised Medical Phrase Groundingcited by 1
  18. 2026VIRO: Robust and Efficient Neuro-Symbolic Reasoning with Verification for Referring Expression Comprehensioncited by 1
  19. 2026WeedExpert-R1: Incentivizing Botanical Reasoning in MLLMs with Reinforcement Learning for Precision Weed Groundingcited by 1
  20. 2026Mixture-of-Thought-Tokens: Unifying Perception and Reasoning for Free-form Multimodal Groundingcited by 1
  21. 2026Teaching MLLMs to Say No: Generalized Referring Expression Comprehension via Refusal Calibrated GRPOcited by 1
  22. 2025CAPE: A CLIP-Aware Pointing Ensemble of Complementary Heatmap Cues for Embodied Reference Understandingcited by 0
  23. 2025Making Dialogue Grounding Data Rich: A Three-Tier Data Synthesis Framework for Generalized Referring Expression Comprehensioncited by 0
  24. 2025RefBench-PRO: Perceptual and Reasoning Oriented Benchmark for Referring Expression Comprehensioncited by 0
  25. 2026VistaRef: Boosting Visual Spatial Orientation Awareness for Pointing-to-Object Detectioncited by 0
  26. 2026UniRef-UAV: A Multimodal Benchmark for Universal Referring in UAV Imagerycited by 0
  27. 2026Vision-Language Grounding as Bidirectional Concept Correspondencecited by 0
  28. 2026MiCo: Mutual Information Coverage Optimization through Semantic Erasure Modeling for Efficient MLLM Inferencecited by 0
  29. 2026AgroGround: Multi-Granularity Grounded Recognition in Agriculturecited by 0
  30. 2026Recognizing Dialogue Ambiguity via Candidate Set Visual Groundingcited by 0