# FiGO: Fine-Grained Object Counting without Annotations

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.11705 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.11705/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 32 of its 41 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Apr 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 32)

- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [SDXL: Improving Latent Diffusion Models for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.01952/) (2023)
- [The Power of Scale for Parameter-Efficient Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08691/) (2021)
- [Grounding DINO: Marrying DINO with Grounded Pre-Training for Open-Set Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05499/) (2023)
- [CutMix: Regularization Strategy to Train Strong Classifiers with Localizable Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.04899/) (2019)
- [SAM 2: Segment Anything in Images and Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00714/) (2024)
- [Prompt-to-Prompt Image Editing with Cross Attention Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.01626/) (2022)
- [Visual Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12119/) (2022)
- [Conditional Prompt Learning for Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05557/) (2022)
- [On Large-Batch Training for Deep Learning: Generalization Gap and Sharp Minima](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.04836/) (2016)
- [Open-Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation with Mask-adapted CLIP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.04150/) (2022)
- [Image Segmentation Using Text and Image Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10003/) (2021)
- [Scaling Open-Vocabulary Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.09683/) (2023)
- [Is synthetic data from generative models ready for image recognition?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.07574/) (2022)
- [GRES: Generalized Referring Expression Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00968/) (2023)
- [Break-A-Scene: Extracting Multiple Concepts from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16311/) (2023)
- [Learning To Count Everything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08391/) (2021)
- [Diversity is Definitely Needed: Improving Model-Agnostic Zero-shot Classification via Stable Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.03298/) (2023)
- [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)
- [CountGD: Multi-Modal Open-World Counting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.04619/) (2024)
- [Zero-shot Object Counting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.02001/) (2023)
- [Few-shot Object Counting and Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.10988/) (2022)
- [DAVE -- A Detect-and-Verify Paradigm for Low-Shot Counting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16622/) (2024)
- [CrowdCLIP: Unsupervised Crowd Counting via Vision-Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.04231/) (2023)
- [Described Object Detection: Liberating Object Detection with Flexible Expressions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.12813/) (2023)
- [Point, Segment and Count: A Generalized Framework for Object Counting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12386/) (2023)
- [The devil is in the fine-grained details: Evaluating open-vocabulary object detectors for fine-grained understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17518/) (2023)
- [Zero-shot Object Counting with Good Exemplars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.04948/) (2024)
- [ABC Easy as 123: A Blind Counter for Exemplar-Free Multi-Class Class-agnostic Counting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.04820/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [The MixCount Dataset: Bridging the Data Gap for Open-Vocabulary Object Counting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.18063/) (2026)
- [RECOUNT: Reference-guided Counting with Synthetic Visual Exemplars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.20621/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Class-agnostic counting (CAC) methods reduce annotation costs by letting users define what to count at test-time through text or visual exemplars. However, current open-vocabulary approaches work well for broad categories but fail when fine-grained category distinctions are needed, such as telling apart waterfowl species or pepper cultivars. We present FiGO, a new annotation-free method that adapts existing counting models to fine-grained categories using only the category name. Our approach uses a text-to-image diffusion model to create synthetic examples and a joint positive/hard-negative loss to learn a compact concept embedding that conditions a specialization module to convert outputs from any frozen counter into accurate, fine-grained estimates. To evaluate fine-grained counting, we introduce LOOKALIKES, a dataset of 37 subcategories across 14 parent categories with many visually similar objects per image. Our method substantially outperforms strong open-vocabulary baselines, moving counting systems from "count all the peppers" to "count only the habaneros."