Papers › Vision-Language Transformer and Query Generation for Referring Segmentation

Vision-Language Transformer and Query Generation for Referring Segmentation

12 Aug 2021ICCV 2021 10arXiv:2108.05565archive 2025-07-28

Henghui Ding, Chang Liu, Suchen Wang, Xudong Jiang

In this work, we address the challenging task of referring segmentation. The query expression in referring segmentation typically indicates the target object by describing its relationship with others. Therefore, to find the target one among all instances in the image, the model must have a holistic understanding of the whole image. To achieve this, we reformulate referring segmentation as a direct attention problem: finding the region in the image where the query language expression is most attended to. We introduce transformer and multi-head attention to build a network with an encoder-decoder attention mechanism architecture that "queries" the given image with the language expression. Furthermore, we propose a Query Generation Module, which produces multiple sets of queries with different attention weights that represent the diversified comprehensions of the language expression from different aspects. At the same time, to find the best way from these diversified comprehensions based on visual clues, we further propose a Query Balance Module to adaptively select the output features of these queries for a better mask generation. Without bells and whistles, our approach is light-weight and achieves new state-of-the-art performance consistently on three referring segmentation datasets, RefCOCO, RefCOCO+, and G-Ref. Our code is available at https://github.com/henghuiding/Vision-Language-Transformer.

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Code

henghuiding/Vision-Language-Transformer officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubtfMIT report

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Tasks

DecoderGeneralized Referring Expression ComprehensionGeneralized Referring Expression SegmentationReferring Expression SegmentationSegmentation

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Generalized Referring Expression Comprehension gRefCOCO VLT N-acc. 35.2 #4 of 5 Archive leaderboard report
Generalized Referring Expression Comprehension gRefCOCO VLT Precision@(F1=1, IoU≥0.5) 36.6 #4 of 5 Archive leaderboard report
Generalized Referring Expression Segmentation gRefCOCO VLT cIoU 52.51 #12 of 13 Archive leaderboard report
Generalized Referring Expression Segmentation gRefCOCO VLT gIoU 52.00 #12 of 13 Archive leaderboard report
Referring Expression Segmentation RefCOCO+ test B VLT Overall IoU 49.36 #21 of 30 Archive leaderboard report
Referring Expression Segmentation RefCOCO+ testA VLT Overall IoU 59.20 #22 of 30 Archive leaderboard report
Referring Expression Segmentation RefCOCO+ val VLT Overall IoU 55.50 #25 of 33 Archive leaderboard report
Referring Expression Segmentation RefCOCOg-test VLT (Darknet53) Overall IoU 56.65 #16 of 18 Archive leaderboard report
Referring Expression Segmentation RefCOCOg-val VLT (Darknet53) Overall IoU 52.99 #20 of 23 Archive leaderboard report
Referring Expression Segmentation RefCoCo val VLT Overall IoU 65.65 #27 of 37 Archive leaderboard report

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Methods

Linear LayerSoftmax

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