mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Talking Points: Describing and Localizing Pixels

arXiv 2510.14583 ↗First posted 16 Oct 2025cs.CV cs.CLcited by 0

On the map: Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models → VLM benchmarks and visual reasoning

Abstract (arXiv)

Vision-language models have achieved remarkable success in cross-modal understanding. Yet, these models remain limited to object-level or region-level grounding, lacking the capability for pixel-precise keypoint comprehension through natural language. We introduce a novel framework for pixel level grounding. The framework consists of two complementary components: a Point Descriptor that generates rich, contextual descriptions of individual keypoints, and a Point Localizer that regresses precise pixel coordinates from these descriptions. Unlike prior work that relies on templated prompts or keypoint names, our approach produces free-form, coarse-to-fine descriptions that situate keypoints within their visual context. Since there is no available dataset to train such a system, we introduce LlamaPointInPart, a carefully curated dataset of 20K+ image-keypoint-description triplets synthesized from multiple vision-language models, capturing multi-scale information from scene-level context to visual features around the keypoint. For cross-category generalization, we optimize the Point Descriptor on AP-10K via GRPO, using the frozen Point Localizer as a reward model to produce descriptions that maximize localization accuracy. To evaluate our results we establish a new evaluation protocol. Instead of comparing the text description produced by our method to the ground truth, we use the localizer to determine how close is the predicted point generated to the ground truth point. Experiments demonstrate superior performance compared to baseline models on LlamaPointInPart.The bidirectional nature of our framework should enable future applications in both keypoint-guided image understanding and language-guided precise localization. Our code and dataset are publicly available at https://github.com/matanr/Talking_Points.

Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in VLM benchmarks and visual reasoning, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models. Builds on 34 of its 40 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 16 Oct 2025.

Builds on

34 of 40 references.

Closest ancestors · 5

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2025Describe Anything: Detailed Localized Image and Video Captioning22 Apr
  2. 2024GROUNDHOG: Grounding Large Language Models to Holistic Segmentation26 Feb
  3. 2023Ferret: Refer and Ground Anything Anywhere at Any Granularity11 Oct
  4. 2023Kosmos-2: Grounding Multimodal Large Language Models to the World26 Jun
  5. 2022Flamingo: a Visual Language Model for Few-Shot Learning29 Apr

Other references · 29

  1. 2014Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Contextcited by 17,498
  2. 2024The Llama 3 Herd of Modelscited by 14,192
  3. 2024DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Modelscited by 8,851
  4. 2023Segment Anythingcited by 8,158
  5. 2023BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Modelscited by 6,069
  6. 2023Grounding DINO: Marrying DINO with Grounded Pre-Training for Open-Set Object Detectioncited by 3,274
  7. 2023Shikra: Unleashing Multimodal LLM's Referential Dialogue Magiccited by 891
  8. 2024SpatialVLM: Endowing Vision-Language Models with Spatial Reasoning Capabilitiescited by 679
  9. 2018Simple Baselines for Human Pose Estimation and Trackingcited by 502
  10. 2022ViTPose: Simple Vision Transformer Baselines for Human Pose Estimationcited by 450
  11. 2013DeepPose: Human Pose Estimation via Deep Neural Networkscited by 305
  12. 2023GPT4RoI: Instruction Tuning Large Language Model on Region-of-Interestcited by 300
17 more
  1. 2023Semantic-SAM: Segment and Recognize Anything at Any Granularitycited by 185
  2. 2024RL-VLM-F: Reinforcement Learning from Vision Language Foundation Model Feedbackcited by 147
  3. 2019DeepFashion2: A Versatile Benchmark for Detection, Pose Estimation, Segmentation and Re-Identification of Clothing Imagescited by 132
  4. 2021Human Pose Regression with Residual Log-likelihood Estimationcited by 131
  5. 2024OMG-LLaVA: Bridging Image-level, Object-level, Pixel-level Reasoning and Understandingcited by 126
  6. 2021AP-10K: A Benchmark for Animal Pose Estimation in the Wildcited by 123
  7. 2019Cross-Domain Adaptation for Animal Pose Estimationcited by 108
  8. 2021PartImageNet: A Large, High-Quality Dataset of Partscited by 107
  9. 2022Pose for Everything: Towards Category-Agnostic Pose Estimationcited by 36
  10. 2023OV-PARTS: Towards Open-Vocabulary Part Segmentationcited by 31
  11. 2022CLAMP: Prompt-based Contrastive Learning for Connecting Language and Animal Posecited by 25
  12. 2023X-Pose: Detecting Any Keypointscited by 21
  13. 2025Test-Time Reinforcement Learning for GUI Grounding via Region Consistencycited by 20
  14. 2024LocLLM: Exploiting Generalizable Human Keypoint Localization via Large Language Modelcited by 17
  15. 2024CapeX: Category-Agnostic Pose Estimation from Textual Point Explanationcited by 9
  16. 2024KptLLM: Unveiling the Power of Large Language Model for Keypoint Comprehensioncited by 5
  17. 2025Recurrent Feature Mining and Keypoint Mixup Padding for Category-Agnostic Pose Estimationcited by 2

Built on by

Not cited yet.

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2025Your Large Vision-Language Model Only Needs A Few Attention Heads For Visual Grounding
  2. 2023Pixel Aligned Language Models
  3. 2024MC-Bench: A Benchmark for Multi-Context Visual Grounding in the Era of MLLMs
  4. 2025GroundingSuite: Measuring Complex Multi-Granular Pixel Grounding
  5. 2023Improved Visual Grounding through Self-Consistent Explanations
  6. 2026Retrieve-to-Localize: Bridging Large Language Models and LiDAR Geometry for Spatial Grounding
  7. 2026FOCUS: Forcing In-Context Object Localization through Visual Support Constraints and Policy Optimization
  8. 2025C2F-Space: Coarse-to-Fine Space Grounding for Spatial Instructions using Vision-Language Models