mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

Count Anything at Any Granularity

arXiv 2605.10887 ↗First posted 11 May 2026cs.CVcited by 1

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

  1. 2025Kimi-VL Technical Report10 Apr
  2. 2024LLaVA-CoT: Let Vision Language Models Reason Step-by-Step15 Nov
  3. 2024Molmo and PixMo: Open Weights and Open Data for State-of-the-Art Vision-Language Models25 Sep
  4. 2023CLIP-Count: Towards Text-Guided Zero-Shot Object Counting12 May
  5. 2023Teaching CLIP to Count to Ten23 Feb

Other references · 52

  1. 2021Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervisioncited by 33,744
  2. 2024The Llama 3 Herd of Modelscited by 14,715
  3. 2023Segment Anythingcited by 8,234
  4. 2023Visual Instruction Tuningcited by 7,869
  5. 2017Mask R-CNNcited by 7,277
  6. 2025Qwen2.5-VL Technical Reportcited by 5,587
  7. 2024GPT-4o System Cardcited by 4,588
  8. 2025Gemini 2.5: Pushing the Frontier with Advanced Reasoning, Multimodality, Long Context, and Next Generation Agentic Capabilitiescited by 3,796
  9. 2023Grounding DINO: Marrying DINO with Grounded Pre-Training for Open-Set Object Detectioncited by 3,332
  10. 2015ShapeNet: An Information-Rich 3D Model Repositorycited by 2,897
  11. 2024SAM 2: Segment Anything in Images and Videoscited by 2,863
  12. 2025Qwen3-VL Technical Reportcited by 2,793
38 more
  1. 2024LLaVA-OneVision: Easy Visual Task Transfercited by 2,719
  2. 2025InternVL3: Exploring Advanced Training and Test-Time Recipes for Open-Source Multimodal Modelscited by 1,834
  3. 2024Expanding Performance Boundaries of Open-Source Multimodal Models with Model, Data, and Test-Time Scalingcited by 1,599
  4. 2022Objaverse: A Universe of Annotated 3D Objectscited by 1,540
  5. 2025InternVL3.5: Advancing Open-Source Multimodal Models in Versatility, Reasoning, and Efficiencycited by 1,510
  6. 2025OpenAI GPT-5 System Cardcited by 989
  7. 2025SAM 3: Segment Anything with Conceptscited by 906
  8. 2023Objaverse-XL: A Universe of 10M+ 3D Objectscited by 774
  9. 2024Structured 3D Latents for Scalable and Versatile 3D Generationcited by 770
  10. 2024SpatialVLM: Endowing Vision-Language Models with Spatial Reasoning Capabilitiescited by 706
  11. 2022Google Scanned Objects: A High-Quality Dataset of 3D Scanned Household Itemscited by 612
  12. 2022Kubric: A scalable dataset generatorcited by 381
  13. 2018Composition Loss for Counting, Density Map Estimation and Localization in Dense Crowdscited by 186
  14. 2025Native and Compact Structured Latents for 3D Generationcited by 175
  15. 2025SpaceR: Reinforcing MLLMs in Video Spatial Reasoningcited by 159
  16. 2017Drone-based Object Counting by Spatially Regularized Regional Proposal Networkcited by 156
  17. 2018TallyQA: Answering Complex Counting Questionscited by 153
  18. 2020NWPU-Crowd: A Large-Scale Benchmark for Crowd Counting and Localizationcited by 151
  19. 2021Learning To Count Everythingcited by 150
  20. 2026Molmo2: Open Weights and Data for Vision-Language Models with Video Understanding and Groundingcited by 139
  21. 2020JHU-CROWD++: Large-Scale Crowd Counting Dataset and A Benchmark Methodcited by 109
  22. 2024T-Rex2: Towards Generic Object Detection via Text-Visual Prompt Synergycited by 94
  23. 2016A Large Contextual Dataset for Classification, Detection and Counting of Cars with Deep Learningcited by 86
  24. 2018Class-Agnostic Countingcited by 85
  25. 2022Represent, Compare, and Learn: A Similarity-Aware Framework for Class-Agnostic Countingcited by 80
  26. 2022CounTR: Transformer-based Generalised Visual Countingcited by 79
  27. 2025Detect Anything via Next Point Predictioncited by 73
  28. 2022A Low-Shot Object Counting Network With Iterative Prototype Adaptationcited by 65
  29. 2022Few-shot Object Counting with Similarity-Aware Feature Enhancementcited by 62
  30. 2024CountGD: Multi-Modal Open-World Countingcited by 59
  31. 2023Zero-shot Object Countingcited by 57
  32. 2022Few-shot Object Counting and Detectioncited by 55
  33. 2024DAVE -- A Detect-and-Verify Paradigm for Low-Shot Countingcited by 49
  34. 2023VLCounter: Text-aware Visual Representation for Zero-Shot Object Countingcited by 45
  35. 2023Open-world Text-specified Object Countingcited by 41
  36. 2024A Novel Unified Architecture for Low-Shot Counting by Detection and Segmentationcited by 21
  37. 2024OmniCount: Multi-label Object Counting with Semantic-Geometric Priorscited by 16
  38. 2024Mind the Prompt: A Novel Benchmark for Prompt-based Class-Agnostic Countingcited by 11

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Citing papers per year: 2026: 1.

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  1. 2025Assessing the Visual Enumeration Abilities of Specialized Counting Architectures and Vision-Language Models
  2. 2026Object Counting Across Modalities: Taxonomies, Benchmarks, Applications, and Open Challenges
  3. 2025A Survey on Class-Agnostic Counting: Advancements from Reference-Based to Open-World Text-Guided Approaches
  4. 2025FiGO: Fine-Grained Object Counting without Annotations
  5. 2025Your Vision-Language Model Can't Even Count to 20: Exposing the Failures of VLMs in Compositional Counting
  6. 2024LVLM-COUNT: Enhancing the Counting Ability of Large Vision-Language Models
  7. 2025SDVPT: Semantic-Driven Visual Prompt Tuning for Open-World Object Counting
  8. 2025Object Counting with GPT-4o and GPT-5: A Comparative Study