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| Main Authors: | , , , |
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| Format: | Preprint |
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2026
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.24166 |
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| _version_ | 1866915889766465536 |
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| author | Zhang, Xu Chen, Zhe Zhang, Jing Tao, Dacheng |
| author_facet | Zhang, Xu Chen, Zhe Zhang, Jing Tao, Dacheng |
| contents | Most referring object detection (ROD) models, especially the modern grounding detectors, are designed for data-rich conditions, yet many practical deployments, such as robotics, augmented reality, and other specialized domains, would face severe label scarcity. In such regimes, end-to-end grounding detectors need to learn spatial and semantic structure from scratch, wasting precious samples. We ask a simple question: Can explicit reasoning priors help models learn more efficiently when data is scarce? To explore this, we first introduce a Data-efficient Referring Object Detection (De-ROD) task, which is a benchmark protocol for measuring ROD performance in low-data and few-shot settings. We then propose the HeROD (Heuristic-inspired ROD), a lightweight, model-agnostic framework that injects explicit, heuristic-inspired spatial and semantic reasoning priors, which are interpretable signals derived based on the referring phrase, into 3 stages of a modern DETR-style pipeline: proposal ranking, prediction fusion, and Hungarian matching. By biasing both training and inference toward plausible candidates, these priors promise to improve label efficiency and convergence performance. On RefCOCO, RefCOCO+, and RefCOCOg, HeROD consistently outperforms strong grounding baselines in scarce-label regimes. More broadly, our results suggest that integrating simple, interpretable reasoning priors provides a practical and extensible path toward better data-efficient vision-language understanding. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_24166 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2026 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Heuristic-inspired Reasoning Priors Facilitate Data-Efficient Referring Object Detection Zhang, Xu Chen, Zhe Zhang, Jing Tao, Dacheng Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Most referring object detection (ROD) models, especially the modern grounding detectors, are designed for data-rich conditions, yet many practical deployments, such as robotics, augmented reality, and other specialized domains, would face severe label scarcity. In such regimes, end-to-end grounding detectors need to learn spatial and semantic structure from scratch, wasting precious samples. We ask a simple question: Can explicit reasoning priors help models learn more efficiently when data is scarce? To explore this, we first introduce a Data-efficient Referring Object Detection (De-ROD) task, which is a benchmark protocol for measuring ROD performance in low-data and few-shot settings. We then propose the HeROD (Heuristic-inspired ROD), a lightweight, model-agnostic framework that injects explicit, heuristic-inspired spatial and semantic reasoning priors, which are interpretable signals derived based on the referring phrase, into 3 stages of a modern DETR-style pipeline: proposal ranking, prediction fusion, and Hungarian matching. By biasing both training and inference toward plausible candidates, these priors promise to improve label efficiency and convergence performance. On RefCOCO, RefCOCO+, and RefCOCOg, HeROD consistently outperforms strong grounding baselines in scarce-label regimes. More broadly, our results suggest that integrating simple, interpretable reasoning priors provides a practical and extensible path toward better data-efficient vision-language understanding. |
| title | Heuristic-inspired Reasoning Priors Facilitate Data-Efficient Referring Object Detection |
| topic | Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.24166 |