# Hierarchical Alignment-enhanced Adaptive Grounding Network for Generalized Referring Expression Comprehension

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.01416 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.01416/

## Key facts

- Cited by 12 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 38 of its 49 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Jan 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 38)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [V-Net: Fully Convolutional Neural Networks for Volumetric Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.04797/) (2016)
- [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)
- [MDETR -- Modulated Detection for End-to-End Multi-Modal Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.12763/) (2021)
- [GroupViT: Semantic Segmentation Emerges from Text Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.11094/) (2022)
- [Ferret: Refer and Ground Anything Anywhere at Any Granularity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.07704/) (2023)
- [CRIS: CLIP-Driven Referring Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.15174/) (2021)
- [Vision-Language Transformer and Query Generation for Referring Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05565/) (2021)
- [MOSE: A New Dataset for Video Object Segmentation in Complex Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.01872/) (2023)
- [MeViS: A Large-scale Benchmark for Video Segmentation with Motion Expressions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.08544/) (2023)
- [Multi-task Collaborative Network for Joint Referring Expression Comprehension and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.08813/) (2020)
- [Universal Instance Perception as Object Discovery and Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.06674/) (2023)
- [Towards Open Vocabulary Learning: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.15880/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Transformer-Based Visual Segmentation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.09854/) (2023)
- [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)
- [VLT: Vision-Language Transformer and Query Generation for Referring Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.15871/) (2022)
- [Modeling Relationships in Referential Expressions with Compositional Modular Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.09978/) (2016)
- [Improving Referring Expression Grounding with Cross-modal Attention-guided Erasing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.00839/) (2019)
- [Improving Visual Grounding with Visual-Linguistic Verification and Iterative Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.00272/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [Multimodal Referring Segmentation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.00265/) (2025)
- [DeRIS: Decoupling Perception and Cognition for Enhanced Referring Image Segmentation through Loopback Synergy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.01738/) (2025)
- [TACO: Think-Answer Consistency for Optimized Long-Chain Reasoning and Efficient Data Learning via Reinforcement Learning in LVLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.20777/) (2025)
- [GREx: Generalized Referring Expression Segmentation, Comprehension, and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.05244/) (2026)
- [PVUW 2025 Challenge Report: Advances in Pixel-level Understanding of Complex Videos in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.11326/) (2025)
- [LSVOS 2025 Challenge Report: Recent Advances in Complex Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.11063/) (2025)
- [Multi-label Instance-level Generalised Visual Grounding in Agriculture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.06699/) (2026)
- [LIHE: Linguistic Instance-Split Hyperbolic-Euclidean Framework for Generalized Weakly-Supervised Referring Expression Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.12020/) (2025)
- [Scaling Representation Diversity: Modulated Attention and Reconstructive Regularization for Visual Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.12748/) (2026)
- [Semantic-Spatial Discriminability Enhancement for Generalized Visual Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.30233/) (2026)
- [0.5%>100%: Bidirectional Reciprocal Learning for Referring Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.24510/) (2026)
- [Knowing Whether, Not Just Where: Anchor-Probing Distillation for Open-Set Remote Sensing Visual Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.13535/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this work, we address the challenging task of Generalized Referring Expression Comprehension (GREC). Compared to the classic Referring Expression Comprehension (REC) that focuses on single-target expressions, GREC extends the scope to a more practical setting by further encompassing no-target and multi-target expressions. Existing REC methods face challenges in handling the complex cases encountered in GREC, primarily due to their fixed output and limitations in multi-modal representations. To address these issues, we propose a Hierarchical Alignment-enhanced Adaptive Grounding Network (HieA2G) for GREC, which can flexibly deal with various types of referring expressions. First, a Hierarchical Multi-modal Semantic Alignment (HMSA) module is proposed to incorporate three levels of alignments, including word-object, phrase-object, and text-image alignment. It enables hierarchical cross-modal interactions across multiple levels to achieve comprehensive and robust multi-modal understanding, greatly enhancing grounding ability for complex cases. Then, to address the varying number of target objects in GREC, we introduce an Adaptive Grounding Counter (AGC) to dynamically determine the number of output targets. Additionally, an auxiliary contrastive loss is employed in AGC to enhance object-counting ability by pulling in multi-modal features with the same counting and pushing away those with different counting. Extensive experimental results show that HieA2G achieves new state-of-the-art performance on the challenging GREC task and also the other 4 tasks, including REC, Phrase Grounding, Referring Expression Segmentation (RES), and Generalized Referring Expression Segmentation (GRES), demonstrating the remarkable superiority and generalizability of the proposed HieA2G.