# Counting Beyond Instances: A Benchmark for Group-Individual Object Counting

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.04716 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.04716/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 22 of its 39 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Sep 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 22 of 22)

- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Grounding DINO: Marrying DINO with Grounded Pre-Training for Open-Set Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05499/) (2023)
- [Qwen3-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.21631/) (2025)
- [InternVL3.5: Advancing Open-Source Multimodal Models in Versatility, Reasoning, and Efficiency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.18265/) (2025)
- [GLM-4.5V and GLM-4.1V-Thinking: Towards Versatile Multimodal Reasoning with Scalable Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.01006/) (2025)
- [Teaching CLIP to Count to Ten](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.12066/) (2023)
- [NWPU-Crowd: A Large-Scale Benchmark for Crowd Counting and Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.03360/) (2020)
- [Learning To Count Everything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08391/) (2021)
- [SGTR: End-to-end Scene Graph Generation with Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.12970/) (2021)
- [Hierarchical Deep Temporal Models for Group Activity Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.02643/) (2016)
- [Actor-Transformers for Group Activity Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.12737/) (2020)
- [CLIP-Count: Towards Text-Guided Zero-Shot Object Counting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.07304/) (2023)
- [CounTR: Transformer-based Generalised Visual Counting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.13721/) (2022)
- [CountGD: Multi-Modal Open-World Counting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.04619/) (2024)
- [Few-shot Object Counting and Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.10988/) (2022)
- [GroupFormer: Group Activity Recognition with Clustered Spatial-Temporal Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.12630/) (2021)
- [DAVE -- A Detect-and-Verify Paradigm for Low-Shot Counting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16622/) (2024)
- [Pushing the Frontiers of Unconstrained Crowd Counting: New Dataset and Benchmark Method](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.12384/) (2019)
- [Vision Transformer Off-the-Shelf: A Surprising Baseline for Few-Shot Class-Agnostic Counting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.04440/) (2023)
- [T2ICount: Enhancing Cross-modal Understanding for Zero-Shot Counting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.20625/) (2025)
- [Rethinking Object Detection in Retail Stores](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.08230/) (2020)
- [Can Current AI Models Count What We Mean, Not What They See? A Benchmark and Systematic Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.13939/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Visual counting is commonly formulated at the instance level, aiming to estimate how many objects of a queried category appear in an image. However, real-world counting often involves higher-level semantic units formed by multiple instances, such as a bunch of grapes, a stack of plates, or a pair of shoes. This exposes a key limitation of existing counting formulations, which mainly focus on what to count, while largely overlooking at which semantic unit to count. We introduce Group-Individual Object Counting (GIC), a new setting that requires models to count both individual objects and semantic groups within a unified framework. To support this new task, we present BunchCount, a real-world benchmark with 1,330 images, 89,254 individual annotations, and 11,065 group annotations. BunchCount provides paired individual-group annotations within the same image and explicitly records containment relations between each group and its constituent individuals. Experiments on BunchCount show that current advanced counting models perform well on individual instances but fail to count semantic groups more accurately. To mitigate semantic granularity conflict, we propose a counting-unit guided relational counting framework, which exploits group-individual containment relations to regularize cross-granularity representations during training. Our method substantially improves group-level counting while better preserving individual-level counting ability, establishing a strong baseline for counting beyond instances.