UGround: Towards Unified Visual Grounding with Unrolled Transformers

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Qian, Rui, Yin, Xin, Deng, Chuanhang, Peng, Zhiyuan, Xiong, Jian, Zhai, Wei, Dou, Dejing
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Qian, Rui
Yin, Xin
Deng, Chuanhang
Peng, Zhiyuan
Xiong, Jian
Zhai, Wei
Dou, Dejing
author_facet Qian, Rui
Yin, Xin
Deng, Chuanhang
Peng, Zhiyuan
Xiong, Jian
Zhai, Wei
Dou, Dejing
contents We present UGround, a \textbf{U}nified visual \textbf{Ground}ing paradigm that dynamically selects intermediate layers across \textbf{U}nrolled transformers as ``mask as prompt,'' diverging from the prevailing pipeline that leverages the fixed last hidden layer as ``\texttt{<SEG>} as prompt.'' UGround addresses two primary challenges posed by the prevailing paradigm: (1) its reliance on the fixed last hidden layer, which sequentially amplifies cumulative errors arising from layer-by-layer propagation without intermediate correction, and (2) its use of \texttt{<SEG>} as a prompt, which implicitly projects textual embeddings into visual space without explicit spatial cues (e.g., coordinates). Central to UGround is Policy-Prompted Masking, which comprises two key components: Stochastic Skip Connection (SSC) and Mask as Prompt (MasP). SSC is a reinforcement learning policy that, via stochastic sampling, allows each \texttt{<SEG>} token to slide across unrolled transformer layers, enabling dynamic layer selection at which it connects to the vision model (e.g., SAM) in a skip-connection fashion. Given the selected hidden layer, MasP uses the similarity map derived from the \texttt{<SEG>} token and image tokens as a soft logit mask to prompt SAM for mask generation, offering explicit spatial cues through its activation regions. To validate the effectiveness of UGround, we, for the first time, have unified visual grounding within a single framework from an attribute perspective, spanning from traditional refer expression segmentation to newly proposed reasoning segmentation, single-target to multi-target, positive query to false premise (empty target). All code and models are publicly available at https://github.com/rui-qian/UGround.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_03853
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle UGround: Towards Unified Visual Grounding with Unrolled Transformers
Qian, Rui
Yin, Xin
Deng, Chuanhang
Peng, Zhiyuan
Xiong, Jian
Zhai, Wei
Dou, Dejing
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
We present UGround, a \textbf{U}nified visual \textbf{Ground}ing paradigm that dynamically selects intermediate layers across \textbf{U}nrolled transformers as ``mask as prompt,'' diverging from the prevailing pipeline that leverages the fixed last hidden layer as ``\texttt{<SEG>} as prompt.'' UGround addresses two primary challenges posed by the prevailing paradigm: (1) its reliance on the fixed last hidden layer, which sequentially amplifies cumulative errors arising from layer-by-layer propagation without intermediate correction, and (2) its use of \texttt{<SEG>} as a prompt, which implicitly projects textual embeddings into visual space without explicit spatial cues (e.g., coordinates). Central to UGround is Policy-Prompted Masking, which comprises two key components: Stochastic Skip Connection (SSC) and Mask as Prompt (MasP). SSC is a reinforcement learning policy that, via stochastic sampling, allows each \texttt{<SEG>} token to slide across unrolled transformer layers, enabling dynamic layer selection at which it connects to the vision model (e.g., SAM) in a skip-connection fashion. Given the selected hidden layer, MasP uses the similarity map derived from the \texttt{<SEG>} token and image tokens as a soft logit mask to prompt SAM for mask generation, offering explicit spatial cues through its activation regions. To validate the effectiveness of UGround, we, for the first time, have unified visual grounding within a single framework from an attribute perspective, spanning from traditional refer expression segmentation to newly proposed reasoning segmentation, single-target to multi-target, positive query to false premise (empty target). All code and models are publicly available at https://github.com/rui-qian/UGround.
title UGround: Towards Unified Visual Grounding with Unrolled Transformers
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.03853