# ResVG: Enhancing Relation and Semantic Understanding in Multiple Instances for Visual Grounding

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.16314 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.16314/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 45 of its 72 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Aug 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 45)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [VQA: Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.00468/) (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)
- [Random Erasing Data Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.04896/) (2017)
- [Modeling Context in Referring Expressions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.00272/) (2016)
- [Vision-and-Language Navigation: Interpreting visually-grounded navigation instructions in real environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07280/) (2017)
- [Generation and Comprehension of Unambiguous Object Descriptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.02283/) (2015)
- [TALL: Temporal Activity Localization via Language Query](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.02101/) (2017)
- [MAttNet: Modular Attention Network for Referring Expression Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.08186/) (2018)
- [Learning 2D Temporal Adjacent Networks for Moment Localization with Natural Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.03590/) (2019)
- [SegDiff: Image Segmentation with Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.00390/) (2021)
- [TransVG: End-to-End Visual Grounding with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08541/) (2021)
- [Cross-Domain Weakly-Supervised Object Detection through Progressive Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.11365/) (2018)
- [A Fast and Accurate One-Stage Approach to Visual Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.06354/) (2019)
- [DiffuMask: Synthesizing Images with Pixel-level Annotations for Semantic Segmentation Using Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11681/) (2023)
- [Text-to-Image Diffusion Models are Zero-Shot Classifiers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15233/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Improving One-stage Visual Grounding by Recursive Sub-query Construction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.01059/) (2020)
- [Diffuse, Attend, and Segment: Unsupervised Zero-Shot Segmentation using Stable Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12469/) (2023)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Zero-Shot Grounding of Objects from Natural Language Queries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07129/) (2019)
- [Robust Classification via a Single Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15241/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Toward Visual Grounding: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.20206/) (2024)
- [TRKT: Weakly Supervised Dynamic Scene Graph Generation with Temporal-enhanced Relation-aware Knowledge Transferring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.04943/) (2025)
- [Paint Outside the Box: Synthesizing and Selecting Training Data for Visual Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.00684/) (2024)
- [Dual Enhancement on 3D Vision-Language Perception for Monocular 3D Visual Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.19165/) (2025)
- [Mixture-of-Thought-Tokens: Unifying Perception and Reasoning for Free-form Multimodal Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.24407/) (2026)
- [Prototype-Aware Multimodal Alignment for Open-Vocabulary Visual Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.06291/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Visual grounding aims to localize the object referred to in an image based on a natural language query. Although progress has been made recently, accurately localizing target objects within multiple-instance distractions (multiple objects of the same category as the target) remains a significant challenge. Existing methods demonstrate a significant performance drop when there are multiple distractions in an image, indicating an insufficient understanding of the fine-grained semantics and spatial relationships between objects. In this paper, we propose a novel approach, the Relation and Semantic-sensitive Visual Grounding (ResVG) model, to address this issue. Firstly, we enhance the model's understanding of fine-grained semantics by injecting semantic prior information derived from text queries into the model. This is achieved by leveraging text-to-image generation models to produce images representing the semantic attributes of target objects described in queries. Secondly, we tackle the lack of training samples with multiple distractions by introducing a relation-sensitive data augmentation method. This method generates additional training data by synthesizing images containing multiple objects of the same category and pseudo queries based on their spatial relationships. The proposed ReSVG model significantly improves the model's ability to comprehend both object semantics and spatial relations, leading to enhanced performance in visual grounding tasks, particularly in scenarios with multiple-instance distractions. We conduct extensive experiments to validate the effectiveness of our methods on five datasets. Code is available at https://github.com/minghangz/ResVG.