# GUIDED: Granular Understanding via Identification, Detection, and Discrimination for Fine-Grained Open-Vocabulary Object Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.27014 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.27014/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Driving VLMs and open-vocabulary detection, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models.
- Builds on 36 of its 43 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Mar 2026.

## Placed in

- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [Driving VLMs and open-vocabulary detection](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/driving-vlms-and-open-vocabulary-detection/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 36)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [GPT-4o System Card](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.21276/) (2024)
- [Improved Baselines with Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03744/) (2023)
- [A ConvNet for the 2020s](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03545/) (2022)
- [Grounding DINO: Marrying DINO with Grounded Pre-Training for Open-Set Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05499/) (2023)
- [Grounded Language-Image Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.03857/) (2021)
- [Open-vocabulary Object Detection via Vision and Language Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13921/) (2021)
- [MDETR -- Modulated Detection for End-to-End Multi-Modal Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.12763/) (2021)
- [OpenAssistant Conversations -- Democratizing Large Language Model Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07327/) (2023)
- [RegionCLIP: Region-based Language-Image Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.09106/) (2021)
- [Detecting Twenty-thousand Classes using Image-level Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.02605/) (2022)
- [YOLO-World: Real-Time Open-Vocabulary Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.17270/) (2024)
- [Open-Vocabulary Object Detection Using Captions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10678/) (2020)
- [Learning to Prompt for Open-Vocabulary Object Detection with Vision-Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14940/) (2022)
- [Open-Vocabulary DETR with Conditional Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11876/) (2022)
- [PACO: Parts and Attributes of Common Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.01795/) (2023)
- [CORA: Adapting CLIP for Open-Vocabulary Detection with Region Prompting and Anchor Pre-Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13076/) (2023)
- [Aligning Bag of Regions for Open-Vocabulary Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13996/) (2023)
- [DetCLIPv2: Scalable Open-Vocabulary Object Detection Pre-training via Word-Region Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.04514/) (2023)
- [Object-Aware Distillation Pyramid for Open-Vocabulary Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05892/) (2023)
- [DetCLIPv3: Towards Versatile Generative Open-vocabulary Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.09216/) (2024)
- [EdaDet: Open-Vocabulary Object Detection Using Early Dense Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.01151/) (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)
- [OV-DINO: Unified Open-Vocabulary Detection with Language-Aware Selective Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.07844/) (2024)
- [Taming Self-Training for Open-Vocabulary Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.06412/) (2023)
- [Learning Background Prompts to Discover Implicit Knowledge for Open Vocabulary Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.00510/) (2024)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Open-Vocabulary Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.05687/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Fine-grained open-vocabulary object detection (FG-OVD) aims to detect novel object categories described by attribute-rich texts. While existing open-vocabulary detectors show promise at the base-category level, they underperform in fine-grained settings due to the semantic entanglement of subjects and attributes in pretrained vision-language model (VLM) embeddings -- leading to over-representation of attributes, mislocalization, and semantic drift in embedding space. We propose GUIDED, a decomposition framework specifically designed to address the semantic entanglement between subjects and attributes in fine-grained prompts. By separating object localization and fine-grained recognition into distinct pathways, HUIDED aligns each subtask with the module best suited for its respective roles. Specifically, given a fine-grained class name, we first use a language model to extract a coarse-grained subject and its descriptive attributes. Then the detector is guided solely by the subject embedding, ensuring stable localization unaffected by irrelevant or overrepresented attributes. To selectively retain helpful attributes, we introduce an attribute embedding fusion module that incorporates attribute information into detection queries in an attention-based manner. This mitigates over-representation while preserving discriminative power. Finally, a region-level attribute discrimination module compares each detected region against full fine-grained class names using a refined vision-language model with a projection head for improved alignment. Extensive experiments on FG-OVD and 3F-OVD benchmarks show that GUIDED achieves new state-of-the-art results, demonstrating the benefits of disentangled modeling and modular optimization. Our code will be released at https://github.com/lijm48/GUIDED.