# GrabVG: Graph-Attentive Binding for Visual Grounding in UAV Imagery

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.18996 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.18996/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 37 of its 49 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Aug 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 37)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [Qwen3 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09388/) (2025)
- [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)
- [Generalized Intersection over Union: A Metric and A Loss for Bounding Box Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09630/) (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)
- [SAM 3: Segment Anything with Concepts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.16719/) (2025)
- [MDETR -- Modulated Detection for End-to-End Multi-Modal Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.12763/) (2021)
- [DOTA: A Large-scale Dataset for Object Detection in Aerial Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10398/) (2017)
- [MAttNet: Modular Attention Network for Referring Expression Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.08186/) (2018)
- [GeoChat: Grounded Large Vision-Language Model for Remote Sensing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.15826/) (2023)
- [A Fast and Accurate One-Stage Approach to Visual Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.06354/) (2019)
- [SeqTR: A Simple yet Universal Network for Visual Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16265/) (2022)
- [RSVG: Exploring Data and Models for Visual Grounding on Remote Sensing Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.12634/) (2022)
- [A Real-Time Cross-modality Correlation Filtering Method for Referring Expression Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.07072/) (2019)
- [Dynamic Graph Attention for Referring Expression Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.08164/) (2019)
- [Vision Meets Drones: A Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.07437/) (2018)
- [Detect Anything via Next Point Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.12798/) (2025)
- [Graph-Structured Referring Expression Reasoning in The Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.08814/) (2020)
- [Shifting More Attention to Visual Backbone: Query-modulated Refinement Networks for End-to-End Visual Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15442/) (2022)
- [SimVG: A Simple Framework for Visual Grounding with Decoupled Multi-modal Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.17531/) (2024)
- [Language Adaptive Weight Generation for Multi-task Visual Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.04652/) (2023)
- [Dynamic MDETR: A Dynamic Multimodal Transformer Decoder for Visual Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.13959/) (2022)
- [ScanFormer: Referring Expression Comprehension by Iteratively Scanning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.18048/) (2024)
- [AerialVG: A Challenging Benchmark for Aerial Visual Grounding by Exploring Positional Relations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.07836/) (2025)
- [PropVG: End-to-End Proposal-Driven Visual Grounding with Multi-Granularity Discrimination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.04833/) (2025)
- [RSGround-R1: Rethinking Remote Sensing Visual Grounding through Spatial Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.21634/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Visual grounding in Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) imagery aims to localize a target object in complex bird's-eye-view scenes according to a natural language description. However, the abundance of small, densely distributed, and visually similar objects creates high visual redundancy, while repetitive local configurations give rise to strong topological ambiguity. Existing approaches mainly focus on visual--language feature alignment or dense contextual interaction, yet they struggle to distinguish subtle inter-instance differences and effectively exploit spatial topological structures, leading to inaccurate grounding in highly crowded scenarios. To address these challenges, we propose GrabVG, a novel visual grounding framework inspired by human visual search. GrabVG explicitly decomposes grounding into two sequential stages: textitpreattentive hypothesis search and textitgraph-attentive feature binding. Specifically, we first generate a compact set of reliable object hypotheses through distillation-guided proposal induction and text-aware hypothesis filtering, substantially reducing background distractions and semantic mismatches. These hypotheses are then organized into a sparse graph, where language-guided intra-instance visual cues and inter-instance topological relationships are jointly bound and propagated via graph attention, enabling efficient spatial reasoning and accurate target localization. Extensive experiments on AerialVG and AerialSense show that GrabVG achieves a favorable accuracy--speed trade-off, reaching 67.31% and 80.34% Acc@0.5 and outperforming the corresponding baselines by 10.55 and 8.76 percentage points, respectively.