# Mastering Negation: Boosting Grounding Models via Grouped Opposition-Based Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.12606 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.12606/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 40 of its 62 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Mar 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 40)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
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- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Deformable DETR: Deformable Transformers for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04159/) (2020)
- [Grounding DINO: Marrying DINO with Grounded Pre-Training for Open-Set Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05499/) (2023)
- [FaceNet: A Unified Embedding for Face Recognition and Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03832/) (2015)
- [Visual Genome: Connecting Language and Vision Using Crowdsourced Dense Image Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.07332/) (2016)
- [InternVL: Scaling up Vision Foundation Models and Aligning for Generic Visual-Linguistic Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14238/) (2023)
- [Flickr30k Entities: Collecting Region-to-Phrase Correspondences for Richer Image-to-Sentence Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04870/) (2015)
- [LVIS: A Dataset for Large Vocabulary Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.03195/) (2019)
- [Grounded Language-Image Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.03857/) (2021)
- [Modeling Context in Referring Expressions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.00272/) (2016)
- [How Far Are We to GPT-4V? Closing the Gap to Commercial Multimodal Models with Open-Source Suites](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16821/) (2024)
- [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)
- [When and why vision-language models behave like bags-of-words, and what to do about it?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.01936/) (2022)
- [Object Detection with Deep Learning: A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.05511/) (2018)
- [SPHINX: The Joint Mixing of Weights, Tasks, and Visual Embeddings for Multi-modal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.07575/) (2023)
- [TransVG: End-to-End Visual Grounding with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08541/) (2021)
- [Multi-Scale Vision Longformer: A New Vision Transformer for High-Resolution Image Encoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15358/) (2021)
- [Multimodal Large Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.13165/) (2023)
- [Universal Instance Perception as Object Discovery and Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.06674/) (2023)
- [CREPE: Can Vision-Language Foundation Models Reason Compositionally?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.07796/) (2022)
- [CLIPN for Zero-Shot OOD Detection: Teaching CLIP to Say No](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12213/) (2023)
- [PhraseCut: Language-based Image Segmentation in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.01187/) (2020)
- [Coarse-to-Fine Vision-Language Pre-training with Fusion in the Backbone](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.07643/) (2022)
- [Ferret-v2: An Improved Baseline for Referring and Grounding with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.07973/) (2024)
- [Referring Expression Comprehension: A Survey of Methods and Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.09554/) (2020)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Current vision-language detection and grounding models predominantly focus on prompts with positive semantics and often struggle to accurately interpret and ground complex expressions containing negative semantics. A key reason for this limitation is the lack of high-quality training data that explicitly captures discriminative negative samples and negation-aware language descriptions. To address this challenge, we introduce D-Negation, a new dataset that provides objects annotated with both positive and negative semantic descriptions. Building upon the observation that negation reasoning frequently appears in natural language, we further propose a grouped opposition-based learning framework that learns negation-aware representations from limited samples. Specifically, our method organizes opposing semantic descriptions from D-Negation into structured groups and formulates two complementary loss functions that encourage the model to reason about negation and semantic qualifiers. We integrate the proposed dataset and learning strategy into a state-of-the-art language-based grounding model. By fine-tuning fewer than 10 percent of the model parameters, our approach achieves improvements of up to 4.4 mAP and 5.7 mAP on positive and negative semantic evaluations, respectively. These results demonstrate that explicitly modeling negation semantics can substantially enhance the robustness and localization accuracy of vision-language grounding models.