# Rank-Consistent Set Reasoning for Co-Salient Object Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.13706 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.13706/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 66 of its 81 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Sep 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 66)

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- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [Grounding DINO: Marrying DINO with Grounded Pre-Training for Open-Set Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05499/) (2023)
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- [Enhanced-alignment Measure for Binary Foreground Map Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.10421/) (2018)
- [Simple Open-Vocabulary Object Detection with Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.06230/) (2022)
- [Multi-scale Interactive Network for Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.09062/) (2020)
- [Deeply supervised salient object detection with short connections](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.04849/) (2016)
- [Visual Saliency Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.12099/) (2021)
- [OCRBench v2: An Improved Benchmark for Evaluating Large Multimodal Models on Visual Text Localization and Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.00321/) (2024)
- [Salient Object Detection: A Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1501.02741/) (2015)
- [DocPedia: Unleashing the Power of Large Multimodal Model in the Frequency Domain for Versatile Document Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.11810/) (2023)
- [MTVQA: Benchmarking Multilingual Text-Centric Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.11985/) (2024)
- [Salient Object Detection: A Discriminative Regional Feature Integration Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1410.5926/) (2014)
- [Dolphin: Document Image Parsing via Heterogeneous Anchor Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.14059/) (2025)
- [UniDoc: A Universal Large Multimodal Model for Simultaneous Text Detection, Recognition, Spotting and Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.11592/) (2023)
- [TabPedia: Towards Comprehensive Visual Table Understanding with Concept Synergy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.01326/) (2024)
- [Few Could Be Better Than All: Feature Sampling and Grouping for Scene Text Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15221/) (2022)
- [Attentive Eraser: Unleashing Diffusion Model's Object Removal Potential via Self-Attention Redirection Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.12974/) (2024)
- [TextSquare: Scaling up Text-Centric Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.12803/) (2024)
- [A Bounding Box is Worth One Token: Interleaving Layout and Text in a Large Language Model for Document Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.01976/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Co-salient object detection (Co-SOD) requires a model to find foreground regions that are salient in individual images and supported by the image group. We present Rank-Consistent Set Reasoning (RCSR), a supervised dense-prediction framework that models a group as an unordered set rather than as a sequence of images or a semantic label. The core idea is to rank how strongly each spatial region agrees with a small collection of learned group slots at every image scale, and to aggregate these ranks with a robust trimmed statistic. This suppresses accidental pairwise matches and prevents one atypical group member from dominating the shared representation. A set encoder builds group slots directly from multi-scale visual features, while a rank-consistency gate measures whether the ordering of candidate regions is stable across group members. The gated slots are decoded jointly with per-image features to produce co-saliency maps. The model contains no natural-language branch, no open-vocabulary detector, and no external segmentation model. We further introduce a group permutation objective and hard-distractor augmentation so that the model learns the properties of a set-level target rather than memorizing image order or isolated visual saliency. We formulate an evaluation protocol for CoCA, CoSal2015, and CoSOD3k, together with tests of group-size robustness, distractor rejection, order invariance, and cross-dataset transfer.