Zero-Shot Referring Expression Comprehension via Vison-Language True/False Verification

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Liu, Jeffrey, Hu, Rongbin
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Liu, Jeffrey
Hu, Rongbin
author_facet Liu, Jeffrey
Hu, Rongbin
contents Referring Expression Comprehension (REC) is usually addressed with task-trained grounding models. We show that a zero-shot workflow, without any REC-specific training, can achieve competitive or superior performance. Our approach reformulates REC as box-wise visual-language verification: given proposals from a COCO-clean generic detector (YOLO-World), a general-purpose VLM independently answers True/False queries for each region. This simple procedure reduces cross-box interference, supports abstention and multiple matches, and requires no fine-tuning. On RefCOCO, RefCOCO+, and RefCOCOg, our method not only surpasses a zero-shot GroundingDINO baseline but also exceeds reported results for GroundingDINO trained on REC and GroundingDINO+CRG. Controlled studies with identical proposals confirm that verification significantly outperforms selection-based prompting, and results hold with open VLMs. Overall, we show that workflow design, rather than task-specific pretraining, drives strong zero-shot REC performance.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_09958
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Zero-Shot Referring Expression Comprehension via Vison-Language True/False Verification
Liu, Jeffrey
Hu, Rongbin
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Referring Expression Comprehension (REC) is usually addressed with task-trained grounding models. We show that a zero-shot workflow, without any REC-specific training, can achieve competitive or superior performance. Our approach reformulates REC as box-wise visual-language verification: given proposals from a COCO-clean generic detector (YOLO-World), a general-purpose VLM independently answers True/False queries for each region. This simple procedure reduces cross-box interference, supports abstention and multiple matches, and requires no fine-tuning. On RefCOCO, RefCOCO+, and RefCOCOg, our method not only surpasses a zero-shot GroundingDINO baseline but also exceeds reported results for GroundingDINO trained on REC and GroundingDINO+CRG. Controlled studies with identical proposals confirm that verification significantly outperforms selection-based prompting, and results hold with open VLMs. Overall, we show that workflow design, rather than task-specific pretraining, drives strong zero-shot REC performance.
title Zero-Shot Referring Expression Comprehension via Vison-Language True/False Verification
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.09958