# WaterVG: Waterway Visual Grounding based on Text-Guided Vision and mmWave Radar

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.12686 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.12686/

## Key facts

- Cited by 13 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 62 of its 103 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Mar 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 62)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [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)
- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [FlashAttention: Fast and Memory-Efficient Exact Attention with IO-Awareness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14135/) (2022)
- [Fast R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.08083/) (2015)
- [ALBERT: A Lite BERT for Self-supervised Learning of Language Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.11942/) (2019)
- [Visual Genome: Connecting Language and Vision Using Crowdsourced Dense Image Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.07332/) (2016)
- [CBAM: Convolutional Block Attention Module](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.06521/) (2018)
- [Rethinking Attention with Performers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.14794/) (2020)
- [Flickr30k Entities: Collecting Region-to-Phrase Correspondences for Richer Image-to-Sentence Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04870/) (2015)
- [Multi-Task Learning Using Uncertainty to Weigh Losses for Scene Geometry and Semantics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07115/) (2017)
- [YOLOX: Exceeding YOLO Series in 2021](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.08430/) (2021)
- [Modeling Context in Referring Expressions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.00272/) (2016)
- [Generalised Dice overlap as a deep learning loss function for highly unbalanced segmentations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.03237/) (2017)
- [Distance-IoU Loss: Faster and Better Learning for Bounding Box Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.08287/) (2019)
- [MAttNet: Modular Attention Network for Referring Expression Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.08186/) (2018)
- [Generalized Focal Loss: Learning Qualified and Distributed Bounding Boxes for Dense Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.04388/) (2020)
- [LAVT: Language-Aware Vision Transformer for Referring Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.02244/) (2021)
- [YOLOv6: A Single-Stage Object Detection Framework for Industrial Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.02976/) (2022)
- [TransVG: End-to-End Visual Grounding with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08541/) (2021)
- [GRES: Generalized Referring Expression Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00968/) (2023)
- [Multi-task Collaborative Network for Joint Referring Expression Comprehension and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.08813/) (2020)
- [A Fast and Accurate One-Stage Approach to Visual Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.06354/) (2019)
- [FastViT: A Fast Hybrid Vision Transformer using Structural Reparameterization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14189/) (2023)
- [Referring Transformer: A One-step Approach to Multi-task Visual Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03089/) (2021)
- [Talk2Car: Taking Control of Your Self-Driving Car](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.10838/) (2019)
- [Learning to Assemble Neural Module Tree Networks for Visual Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.03299/) (2018)
- [SeqTR: A Simple yet Universal Network for Visual Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16265/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [Doracamom: Joint 3D Detection and Occupancy Prediction with Multi-view 4D Radars and Cameras for Omnidirectional Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.15394/) (2025)
- [Talk2Radar: Bridging Natural Language with 4D mmWave Radar for 3D Referring Expression Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.12821/) (2024)
- [NanoMVG: USV-Centric Low-Power Multi-Task Visual Grounding based on Prompt-Guided Camera and 4D mmWave Radar](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.17207/) (2024)
- [Cognitive Disentanglement for Referring Multi-Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.11496/) (2025)
- [RoadSceneVQA: Benchmarking Visual Question Answering in Roadside Perception Systems for Intelligent Transportation System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.18286/) (2025)
- [AerialMind: Towards Referring Multi-Object Tracking in UAV Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.21053/) (2025)
- [Forging Spatial Intelligence: A Roadmap of Multi-Modal Data Pre-Training for Autonomous Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.24385/) (2025)
- [MetaOcc: Spatio-Temporal Fusion of Surround-View 4D Radar and Camera for 3D Occupancy Prediction with Dual Training Strategies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.15384/) (2025)
- [Referring Flexible Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.10342/) (2024)
- [Talk2PC: Enhancing 3D Visual Grounding through LiDAR and Radar Point Clouds Fusion for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.08336/) (2025)
- [Da Yu: Towards USV-Based Image Captioning for Waterway Surveillance and Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.19288/) (2025)
- [WaterVideoQA: ASV-Centric Perception and Rule-Compliant Reasoning via Multi-Modal Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.22923/) (2026)
- [RCVLA: 4D Radar-Grounded Semantic Reasoning and Trajectory Arbitration for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.32681/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The perception of waterways based on human intent is significant for autonomous navigation and operations of Unmanned Surface Vehicles (USVs) in water environments. Inspired by visual grounding, we introduce WaterVG, the first visual grounding dataset designed for USV-based waterway perception based on human prompts. WaterVG encompasses prompts describing multiple targets, with annotations at the instance level including bounding boxes and masks. Notably, WaterVG includes 11,568 samples with 34,987 referred targets, whose prompts integrates both visual and radar characteristics. The pattern of text-guided two sensors equips a finer granularity of text prompts with visual and radar features of referred targets. Moreover, we propose a low-power visual grounding model, Potamoi, which is a multi-task model with a well-designed Phased Heterogeneous Modality Fusion (PHMF) mode, including Adaptive Radar Weighting (ARW) and Multi-Head Slim Cross Attention (MHSCA). Exactly, ARW extracts required radar features to fuse with vision for prompt alignment. MHSCA is an efficient fusion module with a remarkably small parameter count and FLOPs, elegantly fusing scenario context captured by two sensors with linguistic features, which performs expressively on visual grounding tasks. Comprehensive experiments and evaluations have been conducted on WaterVG, where our Potamoi archives state-of-the-art performances compared with counterparts.