Count Anything at Any Granularity
On the map: Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models → VLM benchmarks and visual reasoning
Abstract (arXiv)
Open-world object counting remains brittle: despite rapid advances in vision-language models (VLMs), reliably counting the objects a user intends is far from solved. We argue that a central reason is that counting granularity is left implicit; users may refer to a specific identity, an attribute, an instance type, a category, or an abstract concept, yet most methods treat "what to count" as a single, category-level matching problem. In this work, we redefine open-world counting as multi-grained counting, where visual exemplars specify target appearance and fine-grained text, with optional negative prompts, specifies the intended semantic granularity across five explicit levels. Making granularity explicit, however, exposes a critical data bottleneck: existing counting datasets lack the multi-category scenes, controlled distractors, and instance-level annotations needed to verify fine-grained prompt semantics. To address this, we propose the first fully automatic data-scaling pipeline that integrates controllable 3D synthesis with consistent image editing and VLM-based filtering, and use it to construct KubriCount, the largest and most comprehensively annotated counting dataset to date, supporting both training and multi-grained evaluation. Systematic benchmarking reveals that both multimodal large language models and specialist counting models exhibit severe prompt-following failures under fine-grained distinctions. Motivated by these findings, we train HieraCount, a multi-grained counting model that jointly leverages text and visual exemplars as complementary target specifications. HieraCount substantially improves multi-grained counting accuracy and generalizes robustly to challenging real-world scenarios. The project page is available here: https://verg-avesta.github.io/KubriCount/.
Key facts. Cited by 1 paper in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in VLM benchmarks and visual reasoning, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models. Builds on 57 of its 92 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 11 May 2026.
Builds on
57 of 92 references.
Closest ancestors · 5
Same direction, newest first
- 2025Kimi-VL Technical Report10 Apr
- 2024LLaVA-CoT: Let Vision Language Models Reason Step-by-Step15 Nov
- 2024Molmo and PixMo: Open Weights and Open Data for State-of-the-Art Vision-Language Models25 Sep
- 2023CLIP-Count: Towards Text-Guided Zero-Shot Object Counting12 May
- 2023Teaching CLIP to Count to Ten23 Feb
Other references · 52
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- 2025Gemini 2.5: Pushing the Frontier with Advanced Reasoning, Multimodality, Long Context, and Next Generation Agentic Capabilitiescited by 3,796
- 2023Grounding DINO: Marrying DINO with Grounded Pre-Training for Open-Set Object Detectioncited by 3,332
- 2015ShapeNet: An Information-Rich 3D Model Repositorycited by 2,897
- 2024SAM 2: Segment Anything in Images and Videoscited by 2,863
- 2025Qwen3-VL Technical Reportcited by 2,793
38 more
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- 2022Objaverse: A Universe of Annotated 3D Objectscited by 1,540
- 2025InternVL3.5: Advancing Open-Source Multimodal Models in Versatility, Reasoning, and Efficiencycited by 1,510
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- 2024Structured 3D Latents for Scalable and Versatile 3D Generationcited by 770
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- 2022Google Scanned Objects: A High-Quality Dataset of 3D Scanned Household Itemscited by 612
- 2022Kubric: A scalable dataset generatorcited by 381
- 2018Composition Loss for Counting, Density Map Estimation and Localization in Dense Crowdscited by 186
- 2025Native and Compact Structured Latents for 3D Generationcited by 175
- 2025SpaceR: Reinforcing MLLMs in Video Spatial Reasoningcited by 159
- 2017Drone-based Object Counting by Spatially Regularized Regional Proposal Networkcited by 156
- 2018TallyQA: Answering Complex Counting Questionscited by 153
- 2020NWPU-Crowd: A Large-Scale Benchmark for Crowd Counting and Localizationcited by 151
- 2021Learning To Count Everythingcited by 150
- 2026Molmo2: Open Weights and Data for Vision-Language Models with Video Understanding and Groundingcited by 139
- 2020JHU-CROWD++: Large-Scale Crowd Counting Dataset and A Benchmark Methodcited by 109
- 2024T-Rex2: Towards Generic Object Detection via Text-Visual Prompt Synergycited by 94
- 2016A Large Contextual Dataset for Classification, Detection and Counting of Cars with Deep Learningcited by 86
- 2018Class-Agnostic Countingcited by 85
- 2022Represent, Compare, and Learn: A Similarity-Aware Framework for Class-Agnostic Countingcited by 80
- 2022CounTR: Transformer-based Generalised Visual Countingcited by 79
- 2025Detect Anything via Next Point Predictioncited by 73
- 2022A Low-Shot Object Counting Network With Iterative Prototype Adaptationcited by 65
- 2022Few-shot Object Counting with Similarity-Aware Feature Enhancementcited by 62
- 2024CountGD: Multi-Modal Open-World Countingcited by 59
- 2023Zero-shot Object Countingcited by 57
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- 2024DAVE -- A Detect-and-Verify Paradigm for Low-Shot Countingcited by 49
- 2023VLCounter: Text-aware Visual Representation for Zero-Shot Object Countingcited by 45
- 2023Open-world Text-specified Object Countingcited by 41
- 2024A Novel Unified Architecture for Low-Shot Counting by Detection and Segmentationcited by 21
- 2024OmniCount: Multi-label Object Counting with Semantic-Geometric Priorscited by 16
- 2024Mind the Prompt: A Novel Benchmark for Prompt-based Class-Agnostic Countingcited by 11
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