# T2ICount: Enhancing Cross-modal Understanding for Zero-Shot Counting

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.20625 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.20625/

## Key facts

- Cited by 19 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 30 of its 39 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Feb 2025.

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

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [Adding Conditional Control to Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05543/) (2023)
- [LAION-5B: An open large-scale dataset for training next generation image-text models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08402/) (2022)
- [Grounding DINO: Marrying DINO with Grounded Pre-Training for Open-Set Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05499/) (2023)
- [GLIGEN: Open-Set Grounded Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.07093/) (2023)
- [Drone-based Object Counting by Spatially Regularized Regional Proposal Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.05972/) (2017)
- [Learning To Count Everything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08391/) (2021)
- [Class-Agnostic Counting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.00472/) (2018)
- [CLIP-Count: Towards Text-Guided Zero-Shot Object Counting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.07304/) (2023)
- [Represent, Compare, and Learn: A Similarity-Aware Framework for Class-Agnostic Counting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.08354/) (2022)
- [CounTR: Transformer-based Generalised Visual Counting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.13721/) (2022)
- [A Low-Shot Object Counting Network With Iterative Prototype Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.08217/) (2022)
- [Few-shot Object Counting with Similarity-Aware Feature Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.08959/) (2022)
- [Zero-shot Object Counting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.02001/) (2023)
- [DAVE -- A Detect-and-Verify Paradigm for Low-Shot Counting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16622/) (2024)
- [VLCounter: Text-aware Visual Representation for Zero-Shot Object Counting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.16580/) (2023)
- [Learning to Count Anything: Reference-less Class-agnostic Counting with Weak Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.10203/) (2022)
- [Point, Segment and Count: A Generalized Framework for Object Counting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12386/) (2023)
- [Training-free Object Counting with Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.00038/) (2023)
- [Exemplar Free Class Agnostic Counting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14212/) (2022)
- [A Survey of Recent Advances in CNN-based Single Image Crowd Counting and Density Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.01202/) (2017)
- [FCN-rLSTM: Deep Spatio-Temporal Neural Networks for Vehicle Counting in City Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.09476/) (2017)
- [A Unified Framework for U-Net Design and Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.19638/) (2023)
- [Zero-shot Object Counting with Good Exemplars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.04948/) (2024)
- [A Novel Unified Architecture for Low-Shot Counting by Detection and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.18686/) (2024)
- [DeGPR: Deep Guided Posterior Regularization for Multi-Class Cell Detection and Counting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.00741/) (2023)
- [A Gray-box Attack against Latent Diffusion Model-based Image Editing by Posterior Collapse](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.10901/) (2024)
- [Semi-Supervised Crowd Counting with Contextual Modeling: Facilitating Holistic Understanding of Crowd Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10352/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [CountQA: How Well Do MLLMs Count in the Wild?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.06585/) (2025)
- [Psi-Sampler: Initial Particle Sampling for SMC-Based Inference-Time Reward Alignment in Score Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.01320/) (2025)
- [[De|Re]constructing VLMs' Reasoning in Counting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.19555/) (2025)
- [Beyond Vulnerabilities: A Survey of Adversarial Attacks as Both Threats and Defenses in Computer Vision Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.01845/) (2025)
- [Bootstrapping MLLM for Weakly-Supervised Class-Agnostic Object Counting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.12774/) (2026)
- [Decoupling What to Count and Where to See for Referring Expression Counting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.24374/) (2025)
- [Assessing the Visual Enumeration Abilities of Specialized Counting Architectures and Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.15254/) (2025)
- [CoDi -- an exemplar-conditioned diffusion model for low-shot counting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.20153/) (2025)
- [AdaCount: Training-Free Similarity-Guided Spatial and Feature Adaptation for Zero-Shot Object Counting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.02139/) (2026)
- [Spatially-Aware Class-Agnostic Object Counting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.16826/) (2026)
- [CountZES: Counting via Zero-Shot Exemplar Selection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.16415/) (2025)
- [One-Shot Crowd Counting With Density Guidance For Scene Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.07955/) (2026)
- [Count Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.30846/) (2026)
- [Parallel Tempering Initial Sampling in Inference-Time Reward Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.30991/) (2026)
- [ABACUS: Adapting Unified Foundation Model for Bridging Image Count Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.23835/) (2026)
- [Object Counting Across Modalities: Taxonomies, Benchmarks, Applications, and Open Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.23845/) (2026)
- [Counting Beyond Instances: A Benchmark for Group-Individual Object Counting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.04716/) (2026)
- [DualCount: Structurally Consistent Density and Point Modeling for Zero-Shot Object Counting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.17613/) (2026)
- [Manifold-Constrained Initial Noise Optimization for Efficient Generative Model Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.00365/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Zero-shot object counting aims to count instances of arbitrary object categories specified by text descriptions. Existing methods typically rely on vision-language models like CLIP, but often exhibit limited sensitivity to text prompts. We present T2ICount, a diffusion-based framework that leverages rich prior knowledge and fine-grained visual understanding from pretrained diffusion models. While one-step denoising ensures efficiency, it leads to weakened text sensitivity. To address this challenge, we propose a Hierarchical Semantic Correction Module that progressively refines text-image feature alignment, and a Representational Regional Coherence Loss that provides reliable supervision signals by leveraging the cross-attention maps extracted from the denosing U-Net. Furthermore, we observe that current benchmarks mainly focus on majority objects in images, potentially masking models' text sensitivity. To address this, we contribute a challenging re-annotated subset of FSC147 for better evaluation of text-guided counting ability. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves superior performance across different benchmarks. Code is available at https://github.com/cha15yq/T2ICount.