Daily Papers

Visual perception connects high-level semantic understanding to pixel-level perception, but most existing settings assume that the decisive evidence for identifying a target is already in the image or frozen model knowledge. We study a more practical yet harder open-world case where a visible object must first be resolved from external facts, recent events, long-tail entities, or multi-hop relations before it can be localized. We formalize this challenge as Perception Deep Research and introduce WebEye, an object-anchored benchmark with verifiable evidence, knowledge-intensive queries, precise box/mask annotations, and three task views: Search-based Grounding, Search-based Segmentation, and Search-based VQA. WebEyes contains 120 images, 473 annotated object instances, 645 unique QA pairs, and 1,927 task samples. We further propose Pixel-Searcher, an agentic search-to-pixel workflow that resolves hidden target identities and binds them to boxes, masks, or grounded answers. Experiments show that Pixel-Searcher achieves the strongest open-source performance across all three task views, while failures mainly arise from evidence acquisition, identity resolution, and visual instance binding.

Image-conditioned generation methods, such as depth- and canny-conditioned approaches, have demonstrated remarkable abilities for precise image synthesis. However, existing models still struggle to accurately control the content of multiple instances (or regions). Even state-of-the-art models like FLUX and 3DIS face challenges, such as attribute leakage between instances, which limits user control. To address these issues, we introduce DreamRenderer, a training-free approach built upon the FLUX model. DreamRenderer enables users to control the content of each instance via bounding boxes or masks, while ensuring overall visual harmony. We propose two key innovations: 1) Bridge Image Tokens for Hard Text Attribute Binding, which uses replicated image tokens as bridge tokens to ensure that T5 text embeddings, pre-trained solely on text data, bind the correct visual attributes for each instance during Joint Attention; 2) Hard Image Attribute Binding applied only to vital layers. Through our analysis of FLUX, we identify the critical layers responsible for instance attribute rendering and apply Hard Image Attribute Binding only in these layers, using soft binding in the others. This approach ensures precise control while preserving image quality. Evaluations on the COCO-POS and COCO-MIG benchmarks demonstrate that DreamRenderer improves the Image Success Ratio by 17.7% over FLUX and enhances the performance of layout-to-image models like GLIGEN and 3DIS by up to 26.8%. Project Page: https://limuloo.github.io/DreamRenderer/.

Although text-to-image (T2I) models exhibit remarkable generation capabilities, they frequently fail to accurately bind semantically related objects or attributes in the input prompts; a challenge termed semantic binding. Previous approaches either involve intensive fine-tuning of the entire T2I model or require users or large language models to specify generation layouts, adding complexity. In this paper, we define semantic binding as the task of associating a given object with its attribute, termed attribute binding, or linking it to other related sub-objects, referred to as object binding. We introduce a novel method called Token Merging (ToMe), which enhances semantic binding by aggregating relevant tokens into a single composite token. This ensures that the object, its attributes and sub-objects all share the same cross-attention map. Additionally, to address potential confusion among main objects with complex textual prompts, we propose end token substitution as a complementary strategy. To further refine our approach in the initial stages of T2I generation, where layouts are determined, we incorporate two auxiliary losses, an entropy loss and a semantic binding loss, to iteratively update the composite token to improve the generation integrity. We conducted extensive experiments to validate the effectiveness of ToMe, comparing it against various existing methods on the T2I-CompBench and our proposed GPT-4o object binding benchmark. Our method is particularly effective in complex scenarios that involve multiple objects and attributes, which previous methods often fail to address. The code will be publicly available at https://github.com/hutaihang/ToMe.

Generalized visual grounding tasks, including Generalized Referring Expression Comprehension (GREC) and Segmentation (GRES), extend the classical visual grounding paradigm by accommodating multi-target and non-target scenarios. Specifically, GREC focuses on accurately identifying all referential objects at the coarse bounding box level, while GRES aims for achieve fine-grained pixel-level perception. However, existing approaches typically treat these tasks independently, overlooking the benefits of jointly training GREC and GRES to ensure consistent multi-granularity predictions and streamline the overall process. Moreover, current methods often treat GRES as a semantic segmentation task, neglecting the crucial role of instance-aware capabilities and the necessity of ensuring consistent predictions between instance-level boxes and masks. To address these limitations, we propose InstanceVG, a multi-task generalized visual grounding framework equipped with instance-aware capabilities, which leverages instance queries to unify the joint and consistency predictions of instance-level boxes and masks. To the best of our knowledge, InstanceVG is the first framework to simultaneously tackle both GREC and GRES while incorporating instance-aware capabilities into generalized visual grounding. To instantiate the framework, we assign each instance query a prior reference point, which also serves as an additional basis for target matching. This design facilitates consistent predictions of points, boxes, and masks for the same instance. Extensive experiments obtained on ten datasets across four tasks demonstrate that InstanceVG achieves state-of-the-art performance, significantly surpassing the existing methods in various evaluation metrics. The code and model will be publicly available at https://github.com/Dmmm1997/InstanceVG.

Diffusion models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in generating high-quality images. Recent advancements in Layout-to-Image (L2I) generation have leveraged positional conditions and textual descriptions to facilitate precise and controllable image synthesis. Despite overall progress, current L2I methods still exhibit suboptimal performance. Therefore, we propose InstanceAssemble, a novel architecture that incorporates layout conditions via instance-assembling attention, enabling position control with bounding boxes (bbox) and multimodal content control including texts and additional visual content. Our method achieves flexible adaption to existing DiT-based T2I models through light-weighted LoRA modules. Additionally, we propose a Layout-to-Image benchmark, Denselayout, a comprehensive benchmark for layout-to-image generation, containing 5k images with 90k instances in total. We further introduce Layout Grounding Score (LGS), an interpretable evaluation metric to more precisely assess the accuracy of L2I generation. Experiments demonstrate that our InstanceAssemble method achieves state-of-the-art performance under complex layout conditions, while exhibiting strong compatibility with diverse style LoRA modules.

While Text-to-Image (T2I) diffusion models excel at generating visually appealing images of individual instances, they struggle to accurately position and control the features generation of multiple instances. The Layout-to-Image (L2I) task was introduced to address the positioning challenges by incorporating bounding boxes as spatial control signals, but it still falls short in generating precise instance features. In response, we propose the Instance Feature Generation (IFG) task, which aims to ensure both positional accuracy and feature fidelity in generated instances. To address the IFG task, we introduce the Instance Feature Adapter (IFAdapter). The IFAdapter enhances feature depiction by incorporating additional appearance tokens and utilizing an Instance Semantic Map to align instance-level features with spatial locations. The IFAdapter guides the diffusion process as a plug-and-play module, making it adaptable to various community models. For evaluation, we contribute an IFG benchmark and develop a verification pipeline to objectively compare models' abilities to generate instances with accurate positioning and features. Experimental results demonstrate that IFAdapter outperforms other models in both quantitative and qualitative evaluations.

Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have made significant breakthroughs with the advancement of instruction tuning. However, while existing models can understand images and videos at a holistic level, they still struggle with instance-level understanding that requires a more nuanced comprehension and alignment. Instance-level understanding is crucial, as it focuses on the specific elements that we are most interested in. Excitingly, existing works find that the state-of-the-art LMMs exhibit strong instance understanding capabilities when provided with explicit visual cues. Motivated by this, we introduce an automated annotation pipeline assisted by GPT-4o to extract instance-level information from images and videos through explicit visual prompting for instance guidance. Building upon this pipeline, we proposed Inst-IT, a solution to enhance LMMs in Instance understanding via explicit visual prompt Instruction Tuning. Inst-IT consists of a benchmark to diagnose multimodal instance-level understanding, a large-scale instruction-tuning dataset, and a continuous instruction-tuning training paradigm to effectively enhance spatial-temporal instance understanding capabilities of existing LMMs. Experimental results show that, with the boost of Inst-IT, our models not only achieve outstanding performance on Inst-IT Bench but also demonstrate significant improvements across various generic image and video understanding benchmarks. This highlights that our dataset not only boosts instance-level understanding but also strengthens the overall capabilities of generic image and video comprehension.

Despite rapid advancements in the capabilities of generative models, pretrained text-to-image models still struggle in capturing the semantics conveyed by complex prompts that compound multiple objects and instance-level attributes. Consequently, we are witnessing growing interests in integrating additional structural constraints, typically in the form of coarse bounding boxes, to better guide the generation process in such challenging cases. In this work, we take the idea of structural guidance a step further by making the observation that contemporary image generation models can directly provide a plausible fine-grained structural initialization. We propose a technique that couples this image-based structural guidance with LLM-based instance-level instructions, yielding output images that adhere to all parts of the text prompt, including object counts, instance-level attributes, and spatial relations between instances.

Recent advances in vision language models (VLM) have been driven by contrastive models such as CLIP, which learn to associate visual information with their corresponding text descriptions. However, these models have limitations in understanding complex compositional scenes involving multiple objects and their spatial relationships. To address these challenges, we propose a novel approach that diverges from commonly used strategies, which rely on the design of hard-negative augmentations. Instead, our work focuses on integrating inductive biases into pre-trained CLIP-like models to improve their compositional understanding without using any additional hard-negatives. To that end, we introduce a binding module that connects a scene graph, derived from a text description, with a slot-structured image representation, facilitating a structured similarity assessment between the two modalities. We also leverage relationships as text-conditioned visual constraints, thereby capturing the intricate interactions between objects and their contextual relationships more effectively. Our resulting model not only enhances the performance of CLIP-based models in multi-object compositional understanding but also paves the way towards more accurate and sample-efficient image-text matching of complex scenes.

We present MagicColor, a diffusion-based framework for multi-instance sketch colorization. The production of multi-instance 2D line art colorization adheres to an industry-standard workflow, which consists of three crucial stages: the design of line art characters, the coloring of individual objects, and the refinement process. The artists are required to repeat the process of coloring each instance one by one, which is inaccurate and inefficient. Meanwhile, current generative methods fail to solve this task due to the challenge of multi-instance pair data collection. To tackle these challenges, we incorporate three technical designs to ensure precise character detail transcription and achieve multi-instance sketch colorization in a single forward. Specifically, we first propose the self-play training strategy to solve the lack of training data. Then we introduce an instance guider to feed the color of the instance. To achieve accurate color matching, we present fine-grained color matching with edge loss to enhance visual quality. Equipped with the proposed modules, MagicColor enables automatically transforming sketches into vividly-colored images with accurate consistency and multi-instance control. Experiments on our collected datasets show that our model outperforms existing methods regarding chromatic precision. Specifically, our model critically automates the colorization process with zero manual adjustments, so novice users can produce stylistically consistent artwork by providing reference instances and the original line art. Our code and additional details are available at https://yinhan-zhang.github.io/color

We introduce the Multi-Instance Generation (MIG) task, which focuses on generating multiple instances within a single image, each accurately placed at predefined positions with attributes such as category, color, and shape, strictly following user specifications. MIG faces three main challenges: avoiding attribute leakage between instances, supporting diverse instance descriptions, and maintaining consistency in iterative generation. To address attribute leakage, we propose the Multi-Instance Generation Controller (MIGC). MIGC generates multiple instances through a divide-and-conquer strategy, breaking down multi-instance shading into single-instance tasks with singular attributes, later integrated. To provide more types of instance descriptions, we developed MIGC++. MIGC++ allows attribute control through text \& images and position control through boxes \& masks. Lastly, we introduced the Consistent-MIG algorithm to enhance the iterative MIG ability of MIGC and MIGC++. This algorithm ensures consistency in unmodified regions during the addition, deletion, or modification of instances, and preserves the identity of instances when their attributes are changed. We introduce the COCO-MIG and Multimodal-MIG benchmarks to evaluate these methods. Extensive experiments on these benchmarks, along with the COCO-Position benchmark and DrawBench, demonstrate that our methods substantially outperform existing techniques, maintaining precise control over aspects including position, attribute, and quantity. Project page: https://github.com/limuloo/MIGC.

The notable gap between user-provided and model-preferred prompts poses a significant challenge for generating high-quality images with text-to-image models, compelling the need for prompt engineering. Current studies on prompt engineering can effectively enhance the style and aesthetics of generated images. However, they often neglect the semantic alignment between generated images and user descriptions, resulting in visually appealing but content-wise unsatisfying outputs. In this work, we propose VisualPrompter, a novel training-free prompt engineering framework that refines user inputs to model-preferred sentences. VisualPrompter utilizes an automatic self-reflection module that identifies absent concepts in the generated images, followed by a target-specific prompt optimization mechanism that revises the prompts in a fine-grained manner. By deconstructing prompts, introducing new elements at the atomic semantic level, and then reassembling them, our framework is able to maintain semantic consistency and integrity throughout the optimization process. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of VisualPrompter, which achieves new state-of-the-art performance on multiple benchmarks for text-image alignment evaluation. Additionally, our framework features a plug-and-play design, making it highly adaptable to various generative models. Our code is available at https://github.com/teheperinko541/VisualPrompter.

We introduce a method for the generation of images from an input scene graph. The method separates between a layout embedding and an appearance embedding. The dual embedding leads to generated images that better match the scene graph, have higher visual quality, and support more complex scene graphs. In addition, the embedding scheme supports multiple and diverse output images per scene graph, which can be further controlled by the user. We demonstrate two modes of per-object control: (i) importing elements from other images, and (ii) navigation in the object space, by selecting an appearance archetype. Our code is publicly available at https://www.github.com/ashual/scene_generation

Current vision-language pre-training (VLP) paradigms excel at global scene understanding but struggle with instance-level reasoning due to global-only supervision. We introduce InstAP, an Instance-Aware Pre-training framework that jointly optimizes global vision-text alignment and fine-grained, instance-level contrastive alignment by grounding textual mentions to specific spatial-temporal regions. To support this, we present InstVL, a large-scale dataset (2 million images, 50,000 videos) with dual-granularity annotations: holistic scene captions and dense, grounded instance descriptions. On the InstVL benchmark, InstAP substantially outperforms existing VLP models on instance-level retrieval, and also surpasses a strong VLP baseline trained on the exact same data corpus, isolating the benefit of our instance-aware objective. Moreover, instance-centric pre-training improves global understanding: InstAP achieves competitive zero-shot performance on multiple video benchmarks, including MSR-VTT and DiDeMo. Qualitative visualizations further show that InstAP localizes textual mentions to the correct instances, while global-only models exhibit more diffuse, scene-level attention.

Object binding, the brain's ability to bind the many features that collectively represent an object into a coherent whole, is central to human cognition. It groups low-level perceptual features into high-level object representations, stores those objects efficiently and compositionally in memory, and supports human reasoning about individual object instances. While prior work often imposes object-centric attention (e.g., Slot Attention) explicitly to probe these benefits, it remains unclear whether this ability naturally emerges in pre-trained Vision Transformers (ViTs). Intuitively, they could: recognizing which patches belong to the same object should be useful for downstream prediction and thus guide attention. Motivated by the quadratic nature of self-attention, we hypothesize that ViTs represent whether two patches belong to the same object, a property we term IsSameObject. We decode IsSameObject from patch embeddings across ViT layers using a similarity probe, which reaches over 90% accuracy. Crucially, this object-binding capability emerges reliably in self-supervised ViTs (DINO, MAE, CLIP), but markedly weaker in ImageNet-supervised models, suggesting that binding is not a trivial architectural artifact, but an ability acquired through specific pretraining objectives. We further discover that IsSameObject is encoded in a low-dimensional subspace on top of object features, and that this signal actively guides attention. Ablating IsSameObject from model activations degrades downstream performance and works against the learning objective, implying that emergent object binding naturally serves the pretraining objective. Our findings challenge the view that ViTs lack object binding and highlight how symbolic knowledge of "which parts belong together" emerges naturally in a connectionist system.

In this paper, we address the challenging problem of open-world instance segmentation. Existing works have shown that vanilla visual networks are biased toward learning appearance information, \eg texture, to recognize objects. This implicit bias causes the model to fail in detecting novel objects with unseen textures in the open-world setting. To address this challenge, we propose a learning framework, called view-Consistent LeaRning (v-CLR), which aims to enforce the model to learn appearance-invariant representations for robust instance segmentation. In v-CLR, we first introduce additional views for each image, where the texture undergoes significant alterations while preserving the image's underlying structure. We then encourage the model to learn the appearance-invariant representation by enforcing the consistency between object features across different views, for which we obtain class-agnostic object proposals using off-the-shelf unsupervised models that possess strong object-awareness. These proposals enable cross-view object feature matching, greatly reducing the appearance dependency while enhancing the object-awareness. We thoroughly evaluate our method on public benchmarks under both cross-class and cross-dataset settings, achieving state-of-the-art performance. Project page: https://visual-ai.github.io/vclr

We present ImageBind, an approach to learn a joint embedding across six different modalities - images, text, audio, depth, thermal, and IMU data. We show that all combinations of paired data are not necessary to train such a joint embedding, and only image-paired data is sufficient to bind the modalities together. ImageBind can leverage recent large scale vision-language models, and extends their zero-shot capabilities to new modalities just by using their natural pairing with images. It enables novel emergent applications 'out-of-the-box' including cross-modal retrieval, composing modalities with arithmetic, cross-modal detection and generation. The emergent capabilities improve with the strength of the image encoder and we set a new state-of-the-art on emergent zero-shot recognition tasks across modalities, outperforming specialist supervised models. Finally, we show strong few-shot recognition results outperforming prior work, and that ImageBind serves as a new way to evaluate vision models for visual and non-visual tasks.

The increasing demand for controllable outputs in text-to-image generation has spurred advancements in multi-instance generation (MIG), allowing users to define both instance layouts and attributes. However, unlike image-conditional generation methods such as ControlNet, MIG techniques have not been widely adopted in state-of-the-art models like SD2 and SDXL, primarily due to the challenge of building robust renderers that simultaneously handle instance positioning and attribute rendering. In this paper, we introduce Depth-Driven Decoupled Instance Synthesis (3DIS), a novel framework that decouples the MIG process into two stages: (i) generating a coarse scene depth map for accurate instance positioning and scene composition, and (ii) rendering fine-grained attributes using pre-trained ControlNet on any foundational model, without additional training. Our 3DIS framework integrates a custom adapter into LDM3D for precise depth-based layouts and employs a finetuning-free method for enhanced instance-level attribute rendering. Extensive experiments on COCO-Position and COCO-MIG benchmarks demonstrate that 3DIS significantly outperforms existing methods in both layout precision and attribute rendering. Notably, 3DIS offers seamless compatibility with diverse foundational models, providing a robust, adaptable solution for advanced multi-instance generation. The code is available at: https://github.com/limuloo/3DIS.

Temporally locating objects with arbitrary class texts is the primary pursuit of open-vocabulary Video Instance Segmentation (VIS). Because of the insufficient vocabulary of video data, previous methods leverage image-text pretraining model for recognizing object instances by separately aligning each frame and class texts, ignoring the correlation between frames. As a result, the separation breaks the instance movement context of videos, causing inferior alignment between video and text. To tackle this issue, we propose to link frame-level instance representations as a Brownian Bridge to model instance dynamics and align bridge-level instance representation to class texts for more precisely open-vocabulary VIS (BriVIS). Specifically, we build our system upon a frozen video segmentor to generate frame-level instance queries, and design Temporal Instance Resampler (TIR) to generate queries with temporal context from frame queries. To mold instance queries to follow Brownian bridge and accomplish alignment with class texts, we design Bridge-Text Alignment (BTA) to learn discriminative bridge-level representations of instances via contrastive objectives. Setting MinVIS as the basic video segmentor, BriVIS surpasses the Open-vocabulary SOTA (OV2Seg) by a clear margin. For example, on the challenging large-vocabulary VIS dataset (BURST), BriVIS achieves 7.43 mAP and exhibits 49.49% improvement compared to OV2Seg (4.97 mAP).

Learning image representations without human supervision is an important and active research field. Several recent approaches have successfully leveraged the idea of making such a representation invariant under different types of perturbations, especially via contrastive-based instance discrimination training. Although effective visual representations should indeed exhibit such invariances, there are other important characteristics, such as encoding contextual reasoning skills, for which alternative reconstruction-based approaches might be better suited. With this in mind, we propose a teacher-student scheme to learn representations by training a convolutional net to reconstruct a bag-of-visual-words (BoW) representation of an image, given as input a perturbed version of that same image. Our strategy performs an online training of both the teacher network (whose role is to generate the BoW targets) and the student network (whose role is to learn representations), along with an online update of the visual-words vocabulary (used for the BoW targets). This idea effectively enables fully online BoW-guided unsupervised learning. Extensive experiments demonstrate the interest of our BoW-based strategy which surpasses previous state-of-the-art methods (including contrastive-based ones) in several applications. For instance, in downstream tasks such Pascal object detection, Pascal classification and Places205 classification, our method improves over all prior unsupervised approaches, thus establishing new state-of-the-art results that are also significantly better even than those of supervised pre-training. We provide the implementation code at https://github.com/valeoai/obow.

Visual concept composition, which aims to integrate different elements from images and videos into a single, coherent visual output, still falls short in accurately extracting complex concepts from visual inputs and flexibly combining concepts from both images and videos. We introduce Bind & Compose, a one-shot method that enables flexible visual concept composition by binding visual concepts with corresponding prompt tokens and composing the target prompt with bound tokens from various sources. It adopts a hierarchical binder structure for cross-attention conditioning in Diffusion Transformers to encode visual concepts into corresponding prompt tokens for accurate decomposition of complex visual concepts. To improve concept-token binding accuracy, we design a Diversify-and-Absorb Mechanism that uses an extra absorbent token to eliminate the impact of concept-irrelevant details when training with diversified prompts. To enhance the compatibility between image and video concepts, we present a Temporal Disentanglement Strategy that decouples the training process of video concepts into two stages with a dual-branch binder structure for temporal modeling. Evaluations demonstrate that our method achieves superior concept consistency, prompt fidelity, and motion quality over existing approaches, opening up new possibilities for visual creativity.

Visual prompting (VP) is an emerging parameter-efficient fine-tuning approach to adapting pre-trained vision models to solve various downstream image-classification tasks. However, there has hitherto been little systematic study of the design space of VP and no clear benchmark for evaluating its performance. To bridge this gap, we propose AutoVP, an end-to-end expandable framework for automating VP design choices, along with 12 downstream image-classification tasks that can serve as a holistic VP-performance benchmark. Our design space covers 1) the joint optimization of the prompts; 2) the selection of pre-trained models, including image classifiers and text-image encoders; and 3) model output mapping strategies, including nonparametric and trainable label mapping. Our extensive experimental results show that AutoVP outperforms the best-known current VP methods by a substantial margin, having up to 6.7% improvement in accuracy; and attains a maximum performance increase of 27.5% compared to linear-probing (LP) baseline. AutoVP thus makes a two-fold contribution: serving both as an efficient tool for hyperparameter tuning on VP design choices, and as a comprehensive benchmark that can reasonably be expected to accelerate VP's development. The source code is available at https://github.com/IBM/AutoVP.

Subject-driven image generation is increasingly expected to support fine-grained control over multiple entities within a single image. In multi-reference workflows, users may provide several subject images, a background reference, and long, entity-indexed prompts to control multiple people within one scene. In this setting, a key failure mode is cross-subject attribute misbinding: attributes are preserved, edited, or transferred to the wrong subject. Existing benchmarks and metrics largely emphasize holistic fidelity or per-subject self-similarity, making such failures hard to diagnose. We introduce MultiBind, a benchmark built from real multi-person photographs. Each instance provides slot-ordered subject crops with masks and bounding boxes, canonicalized subject references, an inpainted background reference, and a dense entity-indexed prompt derived from structured annotations. We also propose a dimension-wise confusion evaluation protocol that matches generated subjects to ground-truth slots and measures slot-to-slot similarity using specialists for face identity, appearance, pose, and expression. By subtracting the corresponding ground-truth similarity matrices, our method separates self-degradation from true cross-subject interference and exposes interpretable failure patterns such as drift, swap, dominance, and blending. Experiments on modern multi-reference generators show that MultiBind reveals binding failures that conventional reconstruction metrics miss.

While existing large vision-language multimodal models focus on whole image understanding, there is a prominent gap in achieving region-specific comprehension. Current approaches that use textual coordinates or spatial encodings often fail to provide a user-friendly interface for visual prompting. To address this challenge, we introduce a novel multimodal model capable of decoding arbitrary visual prompts. This allows users to intuitively mark images and interact with the model using natural cues like a "red bounding box" or "pointed arrow". Our simple design directly overlays visual markers onto the RGB image, eliminating the need for complex region encodings, yet achieves state-of-the-art performance on region-understanding tasks like Visual7W, PointQA, and Visual Commonsense Reasoning benchmark. Furthermore, we present ViP-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark to assess the capability of models in understanding visual prompts across multiple dimensions, enabling future research in this domain. Code, data, and model are publicly available.

Text-to-image diffusion models have shown impressive capabilities in generating realistic visuals from natural-language prompts, yet they often struggle with accurately binding attributes to corresponding objects, especially in prompts containing multiple attribute-object pairs. This challenge primarily arises from the limitations of commonly used text encoders, such as CLIP, which can fail to encode complex linguistic relationships and modifiers effectively. Existing approaches have attempted to mitigate these issues through attention map control during inference and the use of layout information or fine-tuning during training, yet they face performance drops with increased prompt complexity. In this work, we introduce a novel compositional generation method that leverages pairwise image embeddings to improve attribute-object binding. Our approach decomposes complex prompts into sub-prompts, generates corresponding images, and computes visual prototypes that fuse with text embeddings to enhance representation. By applying segmentation-based localization training, we address cross-attention misalignment, achieving improved accuracy in binding multiple attributes to objects. Our approaches outperform existing compositional text-to-image diffusion models on the benchmark T2I CompBench, achieving better image quality, evaluated by humans, and emerging robustness under scaling number of binding pairs in the prompt.

The discrimination of instance embeddings plays a vital role in associating instances across time for online video instance segmentation (VIS). Instance embedding learning is directly supervised by the contrastive loss computed upon the contrastive items (CIs), which are sets of anchor/positive/negative embeddings. Recent online VIS methods leverage CIs sourced from one reference frame only, which we argue is insufficient for learning highly discriminative embeddings. Intuitively, a possible strategy to enhance CIs is replicating the inference phase during training. To this end, we propose a simple yet effective training strategy, called Consistent Training for Online VIS (CTVIS), which devotes to aligning the training and inference pipelines in terms of building CIs. Specifically, CTVIS constructs CIs by referring inference the momentum-averaged embedding and the memory bank storage mechanisms, and adding noise to the relevant embeddings. Such an extension allows a reliable comparison between embeddings of current instances and the stable representations of historical instances, thereby conferring an advantage in modeling VIS challenges such as occlusion, re-identification, and deformation. Empirically, CTVIS outstrips the SOTA VIS models by up to +5.0 points on three VIS benchmarks, including YTVIS19 (55.1% AP), YTVIS21 (50.1% AP) and OVIS (35.5% AP). Furthermore, we find that pseudo-videos transformed from images can train robust models surpassing fully-supervised ones.

Text-conditioned image editing has emerged as a powerful tool for editing images. However, in many situations, language can be ambiguous and ineffective in describing specific image edits. When faced with such challenges, visual prompts can be a more informative and intuitive way to convey ideas. We present a method for image editing via visual prompting. Given pairs of example that represent the "before" and "after" images of an edit, our goal is to learn a text-based editing direction that can be used to perform the same edit on new images. We leverage the rich, pretrained editing capabilities of text-to-image diffusion models by inverting visual prompts into editing instructions. Our results show that with just one example pair, we can achieve competitive results compared to state-of-the-art text-conditioned image editing frameworks.

Is vision good enough for language? Recent advancements in multimodal models primarily stem from the powerful reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs). However, the visual component typically depends only on the instance-level contrastive language-image pre-training (CLIP). Our research reveals that the visual capabilities in recent multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) still exhibit systematic shortcomings. To understand the roots of these errors, we explore the gap between the visual embedding space of CLIP and vision-only self-supervised learning. We identify ''CLIP-blind pairs'' - images that CLIP perceives as similar despite their clear visual differences. With these pairs, we construct the Multimodal Visual Patterns (MMVP) benchmark. MMVP exposes areas where state-of-the-art systems, including GPT-4V, struggle with straightforward questions across nine basic visual patterns, often providing incorrect answers and hallucinated explanations. We further evaluate various CLIP-based vision-and-language models and found a notable correlation between visual patterns that challenge CLIP models and those problematic for multimodal LLMs. As an initial effort to address these issues, we propose a Mixture of Features (MoF) approach, demonstrating that integrating vision self-supervised learning features with MLLMs can significantly enhance their visual grounding capabilities. Together, our research suggests visual representation learning remains an open challenge, and accurate visual grounding is crucial for future successful multimodal systems.

As the scale of vision models continues to grow, the emergence of Visual Prompt Tuning (VPT) as a parameter-efficient transfer learning technique has gained attention due to its superior performance compared to traditional full-finetuning. However, the conditions favoring VPT (the ``when") and the underlying rationale (the ``why") remain unclear. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive analysis across 19 distinct datasets and tasks. To understand the ``when" aspect, we identify the scenarios where VPT proves favorable by two dimensions: task objectives and data distributions. We find that VPT is preferrable when there is 1) a substantial disparity between the original and the downstream task objectives (e.g., transitioning from classification to counting), or 2) a similarity in data distributions between the two tasks (e.g., both involve natural images). In exploring the ``why" dimension, our results indicate VPT's success cannot be attributed solely to overfitting and optimization considerations. The unique way VPT preserves original features and adds parameters appears to be a pivotal factor. Our study provides insights into VPT's mechanisms, and offers guidance for its optimal utilization.

Instruction following vision-language (VL) models offer a flexible interface that supports a broad range of multimodal tasks in a zero-shot fashion. However, interfaces that operate on full images do not directly enable the user to "point to" and access specific regions within images. This capability is important not only to support reference-grounded VL benchmarks, but also, for practical applications that require precise within-image reasoning. We build Localized Visual Commonsense models, which allow users to specify (multiple) regions as input. We train our model by sampling localized commonsense knowledge from a large language model (LLM): specifically, we prompt an LLM to collect commonsense knowledge given a global literal image description and a local literal region description automatically generated by a set of VL models. With a separately trained critic model that selects high-quality examples, we find that training on the localized commonsense corpus can successfully distill existing VL models to support a reference-as-input interface. Empirical results and human evaluations in a zero-shot setup demonstrate that our distillation method results in more precise VL models of reasoning compared to a baseline of passing a generated referring expression to an LLM.

Unified multi-model representation spaces are the foundation of multimodal understanding and generation. However, the billions of model parameters and catastrophic forgetting problems make it challenging to further enhance pre-trained unified spaces. In this work, we propose FreeBind, an idea that treats multimodal representation spaces as basic units, and freely augments pre-trained unified space by integrating knowledge from extra expert spaces via "space bonds". Specifically, we introduce two kinds of basic space bonds: 1) Space Displacement Bond and 2) Space Combination Bond. Based on these basic bonds, we design Complex Sequential & Parallel Bonds to effectively integrate multiple spaces simultaneously. Benefiting from the modularization concept, we further propose a coarse-to-fine customized inference strategy to flexibly adjust the enhanced unified space for different purposes. Experimentally, we bind ImageBind with extra image-text and audio-text expert spaces, resulting in three main variants: ImageBind++, InternVL_IB, and InternVL_IB++. These resulting spaces outperform ImageBind on 5 audio-image-text downstream tasks across 9 datasets. Moreover, via customized inference, it even surpasses the advanced audio-text and image-text expert spaces.

Visual in-context learning (VICL), as a new paradigm in computer vision, allows the model to rapidly adapt to various tasks with only a handful of prompts and examples. While effective, the existing VICL paradigm exhibits poor generalizability under distribution shifts. In this work, we propose test-time Visual In-Context Tuning (VICT), a method that can adapt VICL models on the fly with a single test sample. Specifically, we flip the role between the task prompts and the test sample and use a cycle consistency loss to reconstruct the original task prompt output. Our key insight is that a model should be aware of a new test distribution if it can successfully recover the original task prompts. Extensive experiments on six representative vision tasks ranging from high-level visual understanding to low-level image processing, with 15 common corruptions, demonstrate that our VICT can improve the generalizability of VICL to unseen new domains. In addition, we show the potential of applying VICT for unseen tasks at test time. Code: https://github.com/Jiahao000/VICT.

Large-scale vision-language models (VLM) have shown impressive results for language-guided search applications. While these models allow category-level queries, they currently struggle with personalized searches for moments in a video where a specific object instance such as ``My dog Biscuit'' appears. We present the following three contributions to address this problem. First, we describe a method to meta-personalize a pre-trained VLM, i.e., learning how to learn to personalize a VLM at test time to search in video. Our method extends the VLM's token vocabulary by learning novel word embeddings specific to each instance. To capture only instance-specific features, we represent each instance embedding as a combination of shared and learned global category features. Second, we propose to learn such personalization without explicit human supervision. Our approach automatically identifies moments of named visual instances in video using transcripts and vision-language similarity in the VLM's embedding space. Finally, we introduce This-Is-My, a personal video instance retrieval benchmark. We evaluate our approach on This-Is-My and DeepFashion2 and show that we obtain a 15% relative improvement over the state of the art on the latter dataset.

Text-to-image diffusion models produce high quality images but do not offer control over individual instances in the image. We introduce InstanceDiffusion that adds precise instance-level control to text-to-image diffusion models. InstanceDiffusion supports free-form language conditions per instance and allows flexible ways to specify instance locations such as simple single points, scribbles, bounding boxes or intricate instance segmentation masks, and combinations thereof. We propose three major changes to text-to-image models that enable precise instance-level control. Our UniFusion block enables instance-level conditions for text-to-image models, the ScaleU block improves image fidelity, and our Multi-instance Sampler improves generations for multiple instances. InstanceDiffusion significantly surpasses specialized state-of-the-art models for each location condition. Notably, on the COCO dataset, we outperform previous state-of-the-art by 20.4% AP_{50}^box for box inputs, and 25.4% IoU for mask inputs.

As large language models have demonstrated impressive performance in many domains, recent works have adopted language models (LMs) as controllers of visual modules for vision-and-language tasks. While existing work focuses on equipping LMs with visual understanding, we propose two novel interpretable/explainable visual programming frameworks for text-to-image (T2I) generation and evaluation. First, we introduce VPGen, an interpretable step-by-step T2I generation framework that decomposes T2I generation into three steps: object/count generation, layout generation, and image generation. We employ an LM to handle the first two steps (object/count generation and layout generation), by finetuning it on text-layout pairs. Our step-by-step T2I generation framework provides stronger spatial control than end-to-end models, the dominant approach for this task. Furthermore, we leverage the world knowledge of pretrained LMs, overcoming the limitation of previous layout-guided T2I works that can only handle predefined object classes. We demonstrate that our VPGen has improved control in counts/spatial relations/scales of objects than state-of-the-art T2I generation models. Second, we introduce VPEval, an interpretable and explainable evaluation framework for T2I generation based on visual programming. Unlike previous T2I evaluations with a single scoring model that is accurate in some skills but unreliable in others, VPEval produces evaluation programs that invoke a set of visual modules that are experts in different skills, and also provides visual+textual explanations of the evaluation results. Our analysis shows VPEval provides a more human-correlated evaluation for skill-specific and open-ended prompts than widely used single model-based evaluation. We hope our work encourages future progress on interpretable/explainable generation and evaluation for T2I models. Website: https://vp-t2i.github.io

The current modus operandi in adapting pre-trained models involves updating all the backbone parameters, ie, full fine-tuning. This paper introduces Visual Prompt Tuning (VPT) as an efficient and effective alternative to full fine-tuning for large-scale Transformer models in vision. Taking inspiration from recent advances in efficiently tuning large language models, VPT introduces only a small amount (less than 1% of model parameters) of trainable parameters in the input space while keeping the model backbone frozen. Via extensive experiments on a wide variety of downstream recognition tasks, we show that VPT achieves significant performance gains compared to other parameter efficient tuning protocols. Most importantly, VPT even outperforms full fine-tuning in many cases across model capacities and training data scales, while reducing per-task storage cost.

Even in controlled settings, understanding instance-wise geometries is a challenging task for a wide range of visual models. Although specialized systems exist, modern arts rely on expensive input formats (category labels, binary segmentation masks) and inference costs (a quadratic amount of forward passes). We mitigate these limitations by proposing InstaFormer, a network capable of holistic order prediction. That is, solely given an input RGB image, InstaFormer returns the full occlusion and depth orderings for all the instances in the scene in a single forward pass. At its core, InstaFormer relies on interactions between object queries and latent mask descriptors that semantically represent the same objects while carrying complementary information. We comprehensively benchmark and ablate our approach to highlight its effectiveness. Our code and models are open-source and available at this URL: https://github.com/SNU-VGILab/InstaOrder.

CLIP (Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining) has become a popular choice for various downstream tasks. However, recent studies have questioned its ability to represent compositional concepts effectively. These works suggest that CLIP often acts like a bag-of-words (BoW) model, interpreting images and text as sets of individual concepts without grasping the structural relationships. In particular, CLIP struggles to correctly bind attributes to their corresponding objects when multiple objects are present in an image or text. In this work, we investigate why CLIP exhibits this BoW-like behavior. We find that the correct attribute-object binding information is already present in individual text and image modalities. Instead, the issue lies in the cross-modal alignment, which relies on cosine similarity. To address this, we propose Linear Attribute Binding CLIP or LABCLIP. It applies a linear transformation to text embeddings before computing cosine similarity. This approach significantly improves CLIP's ability to bind attributes to correct objects, thereby enhancing its compositional understanding.

Video generation has recently made striking visual progress, but maintaining coherent object motion and interactions remains difficult. We trace two practical bottlenecks: (i) human-provided motion hints (e.g., small 2D maps) often collapse to too few effective tokens after encoding, weakening guidance; and (ii) optimizing for appearance and motion in a single head can favor texture over temporal consistency. We present STANCE, an image-to-video framework that addresses both issues with two simple components. First, we introduce Instance Cues -- a pixel-aligned control signal that turns sparse, user-editable hints into a dense 2.5D (camera-relative) motion field by averaging per-instance flow and augmenting with monocular depth over the instance mask. This reduces depth ambiguity compared to 2D arrow inputs while remaining easy to use. Second, we preserve the salience of these cues in token space with Dense RoPE, which tags a small set of motion tokens (anchored on the first frame) with spatial-addressable rotary embeddings. Paired with joint RGB \(+\) auxiliary-map prediction (segmentation or depth), our model anchors structure while RGB handles appearance, stabilizing optimization and improving temporal coherence without requiring per-frame trajectory scripts.

Despite encouraging progress in 3D scene understanding, it remains challenging to develop an effective Large Multi-modal Model (LMM) that is capable of understanding and reasoning in complex 3D environments. Most previous methods typically encode 3D point and 2D image features separately, neglecting interactions between 2D semantics and 3D object properties, as well as the spatial relationships within the 3D environment. This limitation not only hinders comprehensive representations of 3D scene, but also compromises training and inference efficiency. To address these challenges, we propose a unified Instance-aware 3D Large Multi-modal Model (Inst3D-LMM) to deal with multiple 3D scene understanding tasks simultaneously. To obtain the fine-grained instance-level visual tokens, we first introduce a novel Multi-view Cross-Modal Fusion (MCMF) module to inject the multi-view 2D semantics into their corresponding 3D geometric features. For scene-level relation-aware tokens, we further present a 3D Instance Spatial Relation (3D-ISR) module to capture the intricate pairwise spatial relationships among objects. Additionally, we perform end-to-end multi-task instruction tuning simultaneously without the subsequent task-specific fine-tuning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods across 3D scene understanding, reasoning and grounding tasks. Source code is available at https://github.com/hanxunyu/Inst3D-LMM

Using natural language to query visual information is a fundamental need in real-world applications. Text-Image Retrieval (TIR) retrieves a target image from a gallery based on an image-level description, while Referring Expression Comprehension (REC) localizes a target object within a given image using an instance-level description. However, real-world applications often present more complex demands. Users typically query an instance-level description across a large gallery and expect to receive both relevant image and the corresponding instance location. In such scenarios, TIR struggles with fine-grained descriptions and object-level localization, while REC is limited in its ability to efficiently search large galleries and lacks an effective ranking mechanism. In this paper, we introduce a new task called Referring Expression Instance Retrieval (REIR), which supports both instance-level retrieval and localization based on fine-grained referring expressions. First, we propose a large-scale benchmark for REIR, named REIRCOCO, constructed by prompting advanced vision-language models to generate high-quality referring expressions for instances in the MSCOCO and RefCOCO datasets. Second, we present a baseline method, Contrastive Language-Instance Alignment with Relation Experts (CLARE), which employs a dual-stream architecture to address REIR in an end-to-end manner. Given a referring expression, the textual branch encodes it into a query embedding. The visual branch detects candidate objects and extracts their instance-level visual features. The most similar candidate to the query is selected for bounding box prediction. CLARE is first trained on object detection and REC datasets to establish initial grounding capabilities, then optimized via Contrastive Language-Instance Alignment (CLIA) for improved retrieval across images. We will release our code and benchmark publicly.

Recent advances in text-to-image (T2I) generation have led to impressive visual results. However, these models still face significant challenges when handling complex prompt, particularly those involving multiple subjects with distinct attributes. Inspired by the human drawing process, which first outlines the composition and then incrementally adds details, we propose Detail++, a training-free framework that introduces a novel Progressive Detail Injection (PDI) strategy to address this limitation. Specifically, we decompose a complex prompt into a sequence of simplified sub-prompts, guiding the generation process in stages. This staged generation leverages the inherent layout-controlling capacity of self-attention to first ensure global composition, followed by precise refinement. To achieve accurate binding between attributes and corresponding subjects, we exploit cross-attention mechanisms and further introduce a Centroid Alignment Loss at test time to reduce binding noise and enhance attribute consistency. Extensive experiments on T2I-CompBench and a newly constructed style composition benchmark demonstrate that Detail++ significantly outperforms existing methods, particularly in scenarios involving multiple objects and complex stylistic conditions.

Region-instructed layout control in text-to-image generation is highly practical, yet existing methods suffer from limitations: (i) training-based approaches inherit data bias and often degrade image quality, and (ii) current techniques struggle with occlusion order, limiting real-world usability. To address these issues, we propose LayerBind. By modeling regional generation as distinct layers and binding them during the generation, our method enables precise regional and occlusion controllability. Our motivation stems from the observation that spatial layout and occlusion are established at a very early denoising stage, suggesting that rearranging the early latent structure is sufficient to modify the final output. Building on this, we structure the scheme into two phases: instance initialization and subsequent semantic nursing. (1) First, leveraging the contextual sharing mechanism in multimodal joint attention, Layer-wise Instance Initialization creates per-instance branches that attend to their own regions while anchoring to the shared background. At a designated early step, these branches are fused according to the layer order to form a unified latent with a pre-established layout. (2) Then, Layer-wise Semantic Nursing reinforces regional details and maintains the occlusion order via a layer-wise attention enhancement. Specifically, a sequential layered attention path operates alongside the standard global path, with updates composited under a layer-transparency scheduler. LayerBind is training-free and plug-and-play, serving as a regional and occlusion controller across Diffusion Transformers. Beyond generation, it natively supports editable workflows, allowing for flexible modifications like changing instances or rearranging visible orders. Both qualitative and quantitative results demonstrate LayerBind's effectiveness, highlighting its strong potential for creative applications.

Emerging large-scale text-to-image generative models, e.g., Stable Diffusion (SD), have exhibited overwhelming results with high fidelity. Despite the magnificent progress, current state-of-the-art models still struggle to generate images fully adhering to the input prompt. Prior work, Attend & Excite, has introduced the concept of Generative Semantic Nursing (GSN), aiming to optimize cross-attention during inference time to better incorporate the semantics. It demonstrates promising results in generating simple prompts, e.g., ``a cat and a dog''. However, its efficacy declines when dealing with more complex prompts, and it does not explicitly address the problem of improper attribute binding. To address the challenges posed by complex prompts or scenarios involving multiple entities and to achieve improved attribute binding, we propose Divide & Bind. We introduce two novel loss objectives for GSN: a novel attendance loss and a binding loss. Our approach stands out in its ability to faithfully synthesize desired objects with improved attribute alignment from complex prompts and exhibits superior performance across multiple evaluation benchmarks. More videos and updates can be found on the project page https://sites.google.com/view/divide-and-bind.

Novel Instance Detection and Segmentation (NIDS) aims at detecting and segmenting novel object instances given a few examples of each instance. We propose a unified, simple, yet effective framework (NIDS-Net) comprising object proposal generation, embedding creation for both instance templates and proposal regions, and embedding matching for instance label assignment. Leveraging recent advancements in large vision methods, we utilize Grounding DINO and Segment Anything Model (SAM) to obtain object proposals with accurate bounding boxes and masks. Central to our approach is the generation of high-quality instance embeddings. We utilized foreground feature averages of patch embeddings from the DINOv2 ViT backbone, followed by refinement through a weight adapter mechanism that we introduce. We show experimentally that our weight adapter can adjust the embeddings locally within their feature space and effectively limit overfitting in the few-shot setting. Furthermore, the weight adapter optimizes weights to enhance the distinctiveness of instance embeddings during similarity computation. This methodology enables a straightforward matching strategy that results in significant performance gains. Our framework surpasses current state-of-the-art methods, demonstrating notable improvements in four detection datasets. In the segmentation tasks on seven core datasets of the BOP challenge, our method outperforms the leading published RGB methods and remains competitive with the best RGB-D method. We have also verified our method using real-world images from a Fetch robot and a RealSense camera. Project Page: https://irvlutd.github.io/NIDSNet/

Learning a discriminative model to distinguish a target from its surrounding distractors is essential to generic visual object tracking. Dynamic target representation adaptation against distractors is challenging due to the limited discriminative capabilities of prevailing trackers. We present a new visual Prompting mechanism for generic Visual Object Tracking (PiVOT) to address this issue. PiVOT proposes a prompt generation network with the pre-trained foundation model CLIP to automatically generate and refine visual prompts, enabling the transfer of foundation model knowledge for tracking. While CLIP offers broad category-level knowledge, the tracker, trained on instance-specific data, excels at recognizing unique object instances. Thus, PiVOT first compiles a visual prompt highlighting potential target locations. To transfer the knowledge of CLIP to the tracker, PiVOT leverages CLIP to refine the visual prompt based on the similarities between candidate objects and the reference templates across potential targets. Once the visual prompt is refined, it can better highlight potential target locations, thereby reducing irrelevant prompt information. With the proposed prompting mechanism, the tracker can generate improved instance-aware feature maps through the guidance of the visual prompt, thus effectively reducing distractors. The proposed method does not involve CLIP during training, thereby keeping the same training complexity and preserving the generalization capability of the pretrained foundation model. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks indicate that PiVOT, using the proposed prompting method can suppress distracting objects and enhance the tracker.

How does one adapt a pre-trained visual model to novel downstream tasks without task-specific finetuning or any model modification? Inspired by prompting in NLP, this paper investigates visual prompting: given input-output image example(s) of a new task at test time and a new input image, the goal is to automatically produce the output image, consistent with the given examples. We show that posing this problem as simple image inpainting - literally just filling in a hole in a concatenated visual prompt image - turns out to be surprisingly effective, provided that the inpainting algorithm has been trained on the right data. We train masked auto-encoders on a new dataset that we curated - 88k unlabeled figures from academic papers sources on Arxiv. We apply visual prompting to these pretrained models and demonstrate results on various downstream image-to-image tasks, including foreground segmentation, single object detection, colorization, edge detection, etc.

Weakly supervised whole slide image classification is usually formulated as a multiple instance learning (MIL) problem, where each slide is treated as a bag, and the patches cut out of it are treated as instances. Existing methods either train an instance classifier through pseudo-labeling or aggregate instance features into a bag feature through attention mechanisms and then train a bag classifier, where the attention scores can be used for instance-level classification. However, the pseudo instance labels constructed by the former usually contain a lot of noise, and the attention scores constructed by the latter are not accurate enough, both of which affect their performance. In this paper, we propose an instance-level MIL framework based on contrastive learning and prototype learning to effectively accomplish both instance classification and bag classification tasks. To this end, we propose an instance-level weakly supervised contrastive learning algorithm for the first time under the MIL setting to effectively learn instance feature representation. We also propose an accurate pseudo label generation method through prototype learning. We then develop a joint training strategy for weakly supervised contrastive learning, prototype learning, and instance classifier training. Extensive experiments and visualizations on four datasets demonstrate the powerful performance of our method. Codes will be available.

The remarkable success of Large Language Models (LLMs) and instruction tuning drives the evolution of Vision Language Models (VLMs) towards a versatile general-purpose model. Yet, it remains unexplored whether current VLMs genuinely possess quality object-level image understanding capabilities determined from 'what objects are in the image?' or 'which object corresponds to a specified bounding box?'. Our findings reveal that the image understanding capabilities of current VLMs are strongly correlated with their zero-shot performance on Vision Language (VL) tasks. This suggests that prioritizing basic image understanding is crucial for VLMs to excel at VL tasks. To enhance object-level image understanding, we propose Crayon Large Language and Vision mOdel (CoLLaVO), which incorporates instruction tuning with crayon prompt as a new visual prompt tuning scheme based on panoptic color maps. Furthermore, we present a learning strategy of Dual QLoRA to preserve object-level image understanding without forgetting it during visual instruction tuning, thereby achieving a significant leap in zero-shot numerous VL benchmarks.

Human visual imagination usually begins with analogies or rough sketches. For example, given an image with a girl playing guitar before a building, one may analogously imagine how it seems like if Iron Man playing guitar before Pyramid in Egypt. Nonetheless, visual condition may not be precisely aligned with the imaginary result indicated by text prompt, and existing layout-controllable text-to-image (T2I) generation models is prone to producing degraded generated results with obvious artifacts. To address this issue, we present a novel T2I generation method dubbed SmartControl, which is designed to modify the rough visual conditions for adapting to text prompt. The key idea of our SmartControl is to relax the visual condition on the areas that are conflicted with text prompts. In specific, a Control Scale Predictor (CSP) is designed to identify the conflict regions and predict the local control scales, while a dataset with text prompts and rough visual conditions is constructed for training CSP. It is worth noting that, even with a limited number (e.g., 1,000~2,000) of training samples, our SmartControl can generalize well to unseen objects. Extensive experiments on four typical visual condition types clearly show the efficacy of our SmartControl against state-of-the-arts. Source code, pre-trained models, and datasets are available at https://github.com/liuxiaoyu1104/SmartControl.

Recently, text-to-image models based on diffusion have achieved remarkable success in generating high-quality images. However, the challenge of personalized, controllable generation of instances within these images remains an area in need of further development. In this paper, we present LocRef-Diffusion, a novel, tuning-free model capable of personalized customization of multiple instances' appearance and position within an image. To enhance the precision of instance placement, we introduce a Layout-net, which controls instance generation locations by leveraging both explicit instance layout information and an instance region cross-attention module. To improve the appearance fidelity to reference images, we employ an appearance-net that extracts instance appearance features and integrates them into the diffusion model through cross-attention mechanisms. We conducted extensive experiments on the COCO and OpenImages datasets, and the results demonstrate that our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance in layout and appearance guided generation.

Recent advancements in text-to-image models, such as Stable Diffusion, have demonstrated their ability to synthesize visual images through natural language prompts. One approach of personalizing text-to-image models, exemplified by DreamBooth, fine-tunes the pre-trained model by binding unique text identifiers with a few images of a specific subject. Although existing fine-tuning methods have demonstrated competence in rendering images according to the styles of famous painters, it is still challenging to learn to produce images encapsulating distinct art styles due to abstract and broad visual perceptions of stylistic attributes such as lines, shapes, textures, and colors. In this paper, we introduce a new method, Single-StyleForge, for personalization. It fine-tunes pre-trained text-to-image diffusion models to generate diverse images in specified styles from text prompts. By using around 15-20 images of the target style, the approach establishes a foundational binding of a unique token identifier with a broad range of the target style. It also utilizes auxiliary images to strengthen this binding, resulting in offering specific guidance on representing elements such as persons in a target style-consistent manner. In addition, we present ways to improve the quality of style and text-image alignment through a method called Multi-StyleForge, which inherits the strategy used in StyleForge and learns tokens in multiple. Experimental evaluation conducted on six distinct artistic styles demonstrates substantial improvements in both the quality of generated images and the perceptual fidelity metrics, such as FID, KID, and CLIP scores.

Existing methods for visual reasoning attempt to directly map inputs to outputs using black-box architectures without explicitly modeling the underlying reasoning processes. As a result, these black-box models often learn to exploit biases in the data rather than learning to perform visual reasoning. Inspired by module networks, this paper proposes a model for visual reasoning that consists of a program generator that constructs an explicit representation of the reasoning process to be performed, and an execution engine that executes the resulting program to produce an answer. Both the program generator and the execution engine are implemented by neural networks, and are trained using a combination of backpropagation and REINFORCE. Using the CLEVR benchmark for visual reasoning, we show that our model significantly outperforms strong baselines and generalizes better in a variety of settings.

While recent advancements in multimodal language models have enabled image generation from expressive multi-image instructions, existing methods struggle to maintain performance under complex interleaved instructions. This limitation stems from the structural separation of images and text in current paradigms, which forces models to bridge difficult long-range dependencies to match descriptions with visual targets. To address these challenges, we propose Images iN SEnTences (a.k.a, INSET), a unified generation model that seamlessly embeds images as native vocabulary within textual instructions. By positioning visual features directly at their corresponding semantic slots, INSET leverages the contextual locality of transformers for precise object binding, effectively treating images as dense, expressive language tokens. Furthermore, we introduce a scalable data engine that synthesizes 15M high-quality interleaved samples from standard image and video datasets, utilizing VLMs and LLMs to construct rich, long-horizon sequences. Evaluation results on InterleaveBench demonstrate that INSET significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in multi-image consistency and text alignment, with performance gaps widening as input complexity increases. Beyond standard generation, our approach inherently extends to multimodal image editing, integrating visual content as part of the instruction to facilitate highly expressive and creative visual manipulations.

With advances in foundational and vision-language models, and effective fine-tuning techniques, a large number of both general and special-purpose models have been developed for a variety of visual tasks. Despite the flexibility and accessibility of these models, no single model is able to handle all tasks and/or applications that may be envisioned by potential users. Recent approaches, such as visual programming and multimodal LLMs with integrated tools aim to tackle complex visual tasks, by way of program synthesis. However, such approaches overlook user constraints (e.g., performance / computational needs), produce test-time sample-specific solutions that are difficult to deploy, and, sometimes, require low-level instructions that maybe beyond the abilities of a naive user. To address these limitations, we introduce MMFactory, a universal framework that includes model and metrics routing components, acting like a solution search engine across various available models. Based on a task description and few sample input-output pairs and (optionally) resource and/or performance constraints, MMFactory can suggest a diverse pool of programmatic solutions by instantiating and combining visio-lingual tools from its model repository. In addition to synthesizing these solutions, MMFactory also proposes metrics and benchmarks performance / resource characteristics, allowing users to pick a solution that meets their unique design constraints. From the technical perspective, we also introduced a committee-based solution proposer that leverages multi-agent LLM conversation to generate executable, diverse, universal, and robust solutions for the user. Experimental results show that MMFactory outperforms existing methods by delivering state-of-the-art solutions tailored to user problem specifications. Project page is available at https://davidhalladay.github.io/mmfactory_demo.

Generating images conditioned on multiple visual references is critical for real-world applications such as multi-subject composition, narrative illustration, and novel view synthesis, yet current models suffer from severe performance degradation as the number of input references grows. We identify the root cause as a fundamental data bottleneck: existing datasets are dominated by single- or few-reference pairs and lack the structured, long-context supervision needed to learn dense inter-reference dependencies. To address this, we introduce MacroData, a large-scale dataset of 400K samples, each containing up to 10 reference images, systematically organized across four complementary dimensions -- Customization, Illustration, Spatial reasoning, and Temporal dynamics -- to provide comprehensive coverage of the multi-reference generation space. Recognizing the concurrent absence of standardized evaluation protocols, we further propose MacroBench, a benchmark of 4,000 samples that assesses generative coherence across graded task dimensions and input scales. Extensive experiments show that fine-tuning on MacroData yields substantial improvements in multi-reference generation, and ablation studies further reveal synergistic benefits of cross-task co-training and effective strategies for handling long-context complexity. The dataset and benchmark will be publicly released.

In recent years, online Video Instance Segmentation (VIS) methods have shown remarkable advancement with their powerful query-based detectors. Utilizing the output queries of the detector at the frame-level, these methods achieve high accuracy on challenging benchmarks. However, our observations demonstrate that these methods heavily rely on location information, which often causes incorrect associations between objects. This paper presents that a key axis of object matching in trackers is appearance information, which becomes greatly instructive under conditions where positional cues are insufficient for distinguishing their identities. Therefore, we suggest a simple yet powerful extension to object decoders that explicitly extract embeddings from backbone features and drive queries to capture the appearances of objects, which greatly enhances instance association accuracy. Furthermore, recognizing the limitations of existing benchmarks in fully evaluating appearance awareness, we have constructed a synthetic dataset to rigorously validate our method. By effectively resolving the over-reliance on location information, we achieve state-of-the-art results on YouTube-VIS 2019/2021 and Occluded VIS (OVIS). Code is available at https://github.com/KimHanjung/VISAGE.

Affordance denotes the potential interactions inherent in objects. The perception of affordance can enable intelligent agents to navigate and interact with new environments efficiently. Weakly supervised affordance grounding teaches agents the concept of affordance without costly pixel-level annotations, but with exocentric images. Although recent advances in weakly supervised affordance grounding yielded promising results, there remain challenges including the requirement for paired exocentric and egocentric image dataset, and the complexity in grounding diverse affordances for a single object. To address them, we propose INTeraction Relationship-aware weakly supervised Affordance grounding (INTRA). Unlike prior arts, INTRA recasts this problem as representation learning to identify unique features of interactions through contrastive learning with exocentric images only, eliminating the need for paired datasets. Moreover, we leverage vision-language model embeddings for performing affordance grounding flexibly with any text, designing text-conditioned affordance map generation to reflect interaction relationship for contrastive learning and enhancing robustness with our text synonym augmentation. Our method outperformed prior arts on diverse datasets such as AGD20K, IIT-AFF, CAD and UMD. Additionally, experimental results demonstrate that our method has remarkable domain scalability for synthesized images / illustrations and is capable of performing affordance grounding for novel interactions and objects.

Open-world instance-level scene understanding aims to locate and recognize unseen object categories that are not present in the annotated dataset. This task is challenging because the model needs to both localize novel 3D objects and infer their semantic categories. A key factor for the recent progress in 2D open-world perception is the availability of large-scale image-text pairs from the Internet, which cover a wide range of vocabulary concepts. However, this success is hard to replicate in 3D scenarios due to the scarcity of 3D-text pairs. To address this challenge, we propose to harness pre-trained vision-language (VL) foundation models that encode extensive knowledge from image-text pairs to generate captions for multi-view images of 3D scenes. This allows us to establish explicit associations between 3D shapes and semantic-rich captions. Moreover, to enhance the fine-grained visual-semantic representation learning from captions for object-level categorization, we design hierarchical point-caption association methods to learn semantic-aware embeddings that exploit the 3D geometry between 3D points and multi-view images. In addition, to tackle the localization challenge for novel classes in the open-world setting, we develop debiased instance localization, which involves training object grouping modules on unlabeled data using instance-level pseudo supervision. This significantly improves the generalization capabilities of instance grouping and thus the ability to accurately locate novel objects. We conduct extensive experiments on 3D semantic, instance, and panoptic segmentation tasks, covering indoor and outdoor scenes across three datasets. Our method outperforms baseline methods by a significant margin in semantic segmentation (e.g. 34.5%sim65.3%), instance segmentation (e.g. 21.8%sim54.0%) and panoptic segmentation (e.g. 14.7%sim43.3%). Code will be available.

It has recently been discovered that using a pre-trained vision-language model (VLM), e.g., CLIP, to align a whole query image with several finer text descriptions generated by a large language model can significantly enhance zero-shot performance. However, in this paper, we empirically find that the finer descriptions tend to align more effectively with local areas of the query image rather than the whole image, and then we theoretically validate this finding. Thus, we present a method called weighted visual-text cross alignment (WCA). This method begins with a localized visual prompting technique, designed to identify local visual areas within the query image. The local visual areas are then cross-aligned with the finer descriptions by creating a similarity matrix using the pre-trained VLM. To determine how well a query image aligns with each category, we develop a score function based on the weighted similarities in this matrix. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method significantly improves zero-shot performance across various datasets, achieving results that are even comparable to few-shot learning methods.

Text-to-video generation has evolved rapidly in recent years, delivering remarkable results. Training typically relies on video-caption paired data, which plays a crucial role in enhancing generation performance. However, current video captions often suffer from insufficient details, hallucinations and imprecise motion depiction, affecting the fidelity and consistency of generated videos. In this work, we propose a novel instance-aware structured caption framework, termed InstanceCap, to achieve instance-level and fine-grained video caption for the first time. Based on this scheme, we design an auxiliary models cluster to convert original video into instances to enhance instance fidelity. Video instances are further used to refine dense prompts into structured phrases, achieving concise yet precise descriptions. Furthermore, a 22K InstanceVid dataset is curated for training, and an enhancement pipeline that tailored to InstanceCap structure is proposed for inference. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed InstanceCap significantly outperform previous models, ensuring high fidelity between captions and videos while reducing hallucinations.

In Large Visual Language Models (LVLMs), the efficacy of In-Context Learning (ICL) remains limited by challenges in cross-modal interactions and representation disparities. To overcome these challenges, we introduce a novel Visual In-Context Learning (VICL) method comprising Visual Demonstration Retrieval, Intent-Oriented Image Summarization, and Intent-Oriented Demonstration Composition. Our approach retrieves images via ''Retrieval & Rerank'' paradigm, summarises images with task intent and task-specific visual parsing, and composes language-based demonstrations that reduce token count and alleviate cross-modal interaction problem. Experimental evaluations on five visual reasoning datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. Moreover, our extensive experiments leverage information flow analysis to elucidate the effectiveness of our method, and investigate the impact of length and position of demonstrations for LVLM. The use of in-context unlearning further shows promise in resetting specific model knowledge without retraining.

Large-scale contrastive vision-language pre-training has shown significant progress in visual representation learning. Unlike traditional visual systems trained by a fixed set of discrete labels, a new paradigm was introduced in radford2021learning to directly learn to align images with raw texts in an open-vocabulary setting. On downstream tasks, a carefully chosen text prompt is employed to make zero-shot predictions.~To avoid non-trivial prompt engineering, context optimization zhou2021coop has been proposed to learn continuous vectors as task-specific prompts with few-shot training examples.~In this paper, we show that there is an alternative path to achieve better vision-language models other than prompt tuning.~While prompt tuning is for the textual inputs, we propose CLIP-Adapter to conduct fine-tuning with feature adapters on either visual or language branch. Specifically, CLIP-Adapter adopts an additional bottleneck layer to learn new features and performs residual-style feature blending with the original pre-trained features.~As a consequence, CLIP-Adapter is able to outperform context optimization while maintains a simple design. Experiments and extensive ablation studies on various visual classification tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. Code is released at t https://github.com/gaopengcuhk/CLIP-Adapter.

This paper introduces a new in-context learning (ICL) mechanism called In-Image Learning (I^2L) that combines demonstration examples, visual cues, and chain-of-thought reasoning into an aggregated image to enhance the capabilities of Large Multimodal Models (e.g., GPT-4V) in multimodal reasoning tasks. Unlike previous approaches that rely on converting images to text or incorporating visual input into language models, I^2L consolidates all information into an aggregated image and leverages image processing, understanding, and reasoning abilities. This has several advantages: it reduces inaccurate textual descriptions of complex images, provides flexibility in positioning demonstration examples, and avoids multiple input images and lengthy prompts. We also introduce I^2L-Hybrid, a method that combines the strengths of I^2L with other ICL methods. Specifically, it uses an automatic strategy to select the most suitable method (I^2L or another certain ICL method) for a specific task instance. We conduct extensive experiments to assess the effectiveness of I^2L and I^2L-Hybrid on MathVista, which covers a variety of complex multimodal reasoning tasks. Additionally, we investigate the influence of image resolution, the number of demonstration examples in a single image, and the positions of these demonstrations in the aggregated image on the effectiveness of I^2L. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/AGI-Edgerunners/IIL.

Instance embeddings are an efficient and versatile image representation that facilitates applications like recognition, verification, retrieval, and clustering. Many metric learning methods represent the input as a single point in the embedding space. Often the distance between points is used as a proxy for match confidence. However, this can fail to represent uncertainty arising when the input is ambiguous, e.g., due to occlusion or blurriness. This work addresses this issue and explicitly models the uncertainty by hedging the location of each input in the embedding space. We introduce the hedged instance embedding (HIB) in which embeddings are modeled as random variables and the model is trained under the variational information bottleneck principle. Empirical results on our new N-digit MNIST dataset show that our method leads to the desired behavior of hedging its bets across the embedding space upon encountering ambiguous inputs. This results in improved performance for image matching and classification tasks, more structure in the learned embedding space, and an ability to compute a per-exemplar uncertainty measure that is correlated with downstream performance.

The flexibility and accuracy of methods for automatically counting objects in images and videos are limited by the way the object can be specified. While existing methods allow users to describe the target object with text and visual examples, the visual examples must be manually annotated inside the image, and there is no way to specify what not to count. To address these gaps, we introduce novel capabilities that expand how the target object can be specified. Specifically, we extend the prompt to enable what not to count to be described with text and/or visual examples, introduce the concept of `pseudo-exemplars' that automate the annotation of visual examples at inference, and extend counting models to accept visual examples from both natural and synthetic external images. We also use our new counting model, CountGD++, as a vision expert agent for an LLM. Together, these contributions expand the prompt flexibility of multi-modal open-world counting and lead to significant improvements in accuracy, efficiency, and generalization across multiple datasets. Code is available at https://github.com/niki-amini-naieni/CountGDPlusPlus.

Text-to-image diffusion models have shown great success in generating high-quality text-guided images. Yet, these models may still fail to semantically align generated images with the provided text prompts, leading to problems like incorrect attribute binding and/or catastrophic object neglect. Given the pervasive object-oriented structure underlying text prompts, we introduce a novel object-conditioned Energy-Based Attention Map Alignment (EBAMA) method to address the aforementioned problems. We show that an object-centric attribute binding loss naturally emerges by approximately maximizing the log-likelihood of a z-parameterized energy-based model with the help of the negative sampling technique. We further propose an object-centric intensity regularizer to prevent excessive shifts of objects attention towards their attributes. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments, including human evaluation, on several challenging benchmarks demonstrate the superior performance of our method over previous strong counterparts. With better aligned attention maps, our approach shows great promise in further enhancing the text-controlled image editing ability of diffusion models.

This paper introduces a tuning-free method for both object insertion and subject-driven generation. The task involves composing an object, given multiple views, into a scene specified by either an image or text. Existing methods struggle to fully meet the task's challenging objectives: (i) seamlessly composing the object into the scene with photorealistic pose and lighting, and (ii) preserving the object's identity. We hypothesize that achieving these goals requires large scale supervision, but manually collecting sufficient data is simply too expensive. The key observation in this paper is that many mass-produced objects recur across multiple images of large unlabeled datasets, in different scenes, poses, and lighting conditions. We use this observation to create massive supervision by retrieving sets of diverse views of the same object. This powerful paired dataset enables us to train a straightforward text-to-image diffusion architecture to map the object and scene descriptions to the composited image. We compare our method, ObjectMate, with state-of-the-art methods for object insertion and subject-driven generation, using a single or multiple references. Empirically, ObjectMate achieves superior identity preservation and more photorealistic composition. Differently from many other multi-reference methods, ObjectMate does not require slow test-time tuning.

Natural language often struggles to accurately associate positional and attribute information with multiple instances, which limits current text-based visual generation models to simpler compositions featuring only a few dominant instances. To address this limitation, this work enhances diffusion models by introducing regional instance control, where each instance is governed by a bounding box paired with a free-form caption. Previous methods in this area typically rely on implicit position encoding or explicit attention masks to separate regions of interest (ROIs), resulting in either inaccurate coordinate injection or large computational overhead. Inspired by ROI-Align in object detection, we introduce a complementary operation called ROI-Unpool. Together, ROI-Align and ROI-Unpool enable explicit, efficient, and accurate ROI manipulation on high-resolution feature maps for visual generation. Building on ROI-Unpool, we propose ROICtrl, an adapter for pretrained diffusion models that enables precise regional instance control. ROICtrl is compatible with community-finetuned diffusion models, as well as with existing spatial-based add-ons (\eg, ControlNet, T2I-Adapter) and embedding-based add-ons (\eg, IP-Adapter, ED-LoRA), extending their applications to multi-instance generation. Experiments show that ROICtrl achieves superior performance in regional instance control while significantly reducing computational costs.

Semantic mapping based on the supervised object detectors is sensitive to image distribution. In real-world environments, the object detection and segmentation performance can lead to a major drop, preventing the use of semantic mapping in a wider domain. On the other hand, the development of vision-language foundation models demonstrates a strong zero-shot transferability across data distribution. It provides an opportunity to construct generalizable instance-aware semantic maps. Hence, this work explores how to boost instance-aware semantic mapping from object detection generated from foundation models. We propose a probabilistic label fusion method to predict close-set semantic classes from open-set label measurements. An instance refinement module merges the over-segmented instances caused by inconsistent segmentation. We integrate all the modules into a unified semantic mapping system. Reading a sequence of RGB-D input, our work incrementally reconstructs an instance-aware semantic map. We evaluate the zero-shot performance of our method in ScanNet and SceneNN datasets. Our method achieves 40.3 mean average precision (mAP) on the ScanNet semantic instance segmentation task. It outperforms the traditional semantic mapping method significantly.

Visual grounding, a crucial vision-language task involving the understanding of the visual context based on the query expression, necessitates the model to capture the interactions between objects, as well as various spatial and attribute information. However, the annotation data of visual grounding task is limited due to its time-consuming and labor-intensive annotation process, resulting in the trained models being constrained from generalizing its capability to a broader domain. To address this challenge, we propose GroundVLP, a simple yet effective zero-shot method that harnesses visual grounding ability from the existing models trained from image-text pairs and pure object detection data, both of which are more conveniently obtainable and offer a broader domain compared to visual grounding annotation data. GroundVLP proposes a fusion mechanism that combines the heatmap from GradCAM and the object proposals of open-vocabulary detectors. We demonstrate that the proposed method significantly outperforms other zero-shot methods on RefCOCO/+/g datasets, surpassing prior zero-shot state-of-the-art by approximately 28\% on the test split of RefCOCO and RefCOCO+. Furthermore, GroundVLP performs comparably to or even better than some non-VLP-based supervised models on the Flickr30k entities dataset. Our code is available at https://github.com/om-ai-lab/GroundVLP.

Various stuff and things in visual data possess specific traits, which can be learned by deep neural networks and are implicitly represented as the visual prior, e.g., object location and shape, in the model. Such prior potentially impacts many vision tasks. For example, in conditional image synthesis, spatial conditions failing to adhere to the prior can result in visually inaccurate synthetic results. This work aims to explicitly learn the visual prior and enable the customization of sampling. Inspired by advances in language modeling, we propose to learn Visual prior via Generative Pre-Training, dubbed VisorGPT. By discretizing visual locations of objects, e.g., bounding boxes, human pose, and instance masks, into sequences, \our~can model visual prior through likelihood maximization. Besides, prompt engineering is investigated to unify various visual locations and enable customized sampling of sequential outputs from the learned prior. Experimental results demonstrate that \our~can effectively model the visual prior, which can be employed for many vision tasks, such as customizing accurate human pose for conditional image synthesis models like ControlNet. Code will be released at https://github.com/Sierkinhane/VisorGPT.

Learning visual representations with self-supervised learning has become popular in computer vision. The idea is to design auxiliary tasks where labels are free to obtain. Most of these tasks end up providing data to learn specific kinds of invariance useful for recognition. In this paper, we propose to exploit different self-supervised approaches to learn representations invariant to (i) inter-instance variations (two objects in the same class should have similar features) and (ii) intra-instance variations (viewpoint, pose, deformations, illumination, etc). Instead of combining two approaches with multi-task learning, we argue to organize and reason the data with multiple variations. Specifically, we propose to generate a graph with millions of objects mined from hundreds of thousands of videos. The objects are connected by two types of edges which correspond to two types of invariance: "different instances but a similar viewpoint and category" and "different viewpoints of the same instance". By applying simple transitivity on the graph with these edges, we can obtain pairs of images exhibiting richer visual invariance. We use this data to train a Triplet-Siamese network with VGG16 as the base architecture and apply the learned representations to different recognition tasks. For object detection, we achieve 63.2% mAP on PASCAL VOC 2007 using Fast R-CNN (compare to 67.3% with ImageNet pre-training). For the challenging COCO dataset, our method is surprisingly close (23.5%) to the ImageNet-supervised counterpart (24.4%) using the Faster R-CNN framework. We also show that our network can perform significantly better than the ImageNet network in the surface normal estimation task.

Conditional graphic layout generation, which automatically maps user constraints to high-quality layouts, has attracted widespread attention today. Although recent works have achieved promising performance, the lack of versatility and data efficiency hinders their practical applications. In this work, we propose LayoutPrompter, which leverages large language models (LLMs) to address the above problems through in-context learning. LayoutPrompter is made up of three key components, namely input-output serialization, dynamic exemplar selection and layout ranking. Specifically, the input-output serialization component meticulously designs the input and output formats for each layout generation task. Dynamic exemplar selection is responsible for selecting the most helpful prompting exemplars for a given input. And a layout ranker is used to pick the highest quality layout from multiple outputs of LLMs. We conduct experiments on all existing layout generation tasks using four public datasets. Despite the simplicity of our approach, experimental results show that LayoutPrompter can compete with or even outperform state-of-the-art approaches on these tasks without any model training or fine-tuning. This demonstrates the effectiveness of this versatile and training-free approach. In addition, the ablation studies show that LayoutPrompter is significantly superior to the training-based baseline in a low-data regime, further indicating the data efficiency of LayoutPrompter. Our project is available at https://github.com/microsoft/LayoutGeneration/tree/main/LayoutPrompter.

We propose a method for the weakly supervised detection of objects in paintings. At training time, only image-level annotations are needed. This, combined with the efficiency of our multiple-instance learning method, enables one to learn new classes on-the-fly from globally annotated databases, avoiding the tedious task of manually marking objects. We show on several databases that dropping the instance-level annotations only yields mild performance losses. We also introduce a new database, IconArt, on which we perform detection experiments on classes that could not be learned on photographs, such as Jesus Child or Saint Sebastian. To the best of our knowledge, these are the first experiments dealing with the automatic (and in our case weakly supervised) detection of iconographic elements in paintings. We believe that such a method is of great benefit for helping art historians to explore large digital databases.

Text-to-image diffusion generative models can generate high quality images at the cost of tedious prompt engineering. Controllability can be improved by introducing layout conditioning, however existing methods lack layout editing ability and fine-grained control over object attributes. The concept of multi-layer generation holds great potential to address these limitations, however generating image instances concurrently to scene composition limits control over fine-grained object attributes, relative positioning in 3D space and scene manipulation abilities. In this work, we propose a novel multi-stage generation paradigm that is designed for fine-grained control, flexibility and interactivity. To ensure control over instance attributes, we devise a novel training paradigm to adapt a diffusion model to generate isolated scene components as RGBA images with transparency information. To build complex images, we employ these pre-generated instances and introduce a multi-layer composite generation process that smoothly assembles components in realistic scenes. Our experiments show that our RGBA diffusion model is capable of generating diverse and high quality instances with precise control over object attributes. Through multi-layer composition, we demonstrate that our approach allows to build and manipulate images from highly complex prompts with fine-grained control over object appearance and location, granting a higher degree of control than competing methods.

With most modern visualization tools, authors need to transform their data into tidy formats to create visualizations they want. Because this requires experience with programming or separate data processing tools, data transformation remains a barrier in visualization authoring. To address this challenge, we present a new visualization paradigm, concept binding, that separates high-level visualization intents and low-level data transformation steps, leveraging an AI agent. We realize this paradigm in Data Formulator, an interactive visualization authoring tool. With Data Formulator, authors first define data concepts they plan to visualize using natural languages or examples, and then bind them to visual channels. Data Formulator then dispatches its AI-agent to automatically transform the input data to surface these concepts and generate desired visualizations. When presenting the results (transformed table and output visualizations) from the AI agent, Data Formulator provides feedback to help authors inspect and understand them. A user study with 10 participants shows that participants could learn and use Data Formulator to create visualizations that involve challenging data transformations, and presents interesting future research directions.

Visual Prompt Tuning (VPT) is an effective tuning method for adapting pretrained Vision Transformers (ViTs) to downstream tasks. It leverages extra learnable tokens, known as prompts, which steer the frozen pretrained ViTs. Although VPT has demonstrated its applicability with supervised vision transformers, it often underperforms with self-supervised ones. Through empirical observations, we deduce that the effectiveness of VPT hinges largely on the ViT blocks with which the prompt tokens interact. Specifically, VPT shows improved performance on image classification tasks for MAE and MoCo v3 when the prompt tokens are inserted into later blocks rather than the first block. These observations suggest that there exists an optimal location of blocks for the insertion of prompt tokens. Unfortunately, identifying the optimal blocks for prompts within each self-supervised ViT for diverse future scenarios is a costly process. To mitigate this problem, we propose a simple yet effective method that learns a gate for each ViT block to adjust its intervention into the prompt tokens. With our method, prompt tokens are selectively influenced by blocks that require steering for task adaptation. Our method outperforms VPT variants in FGVC and VTAB image classification and ADE20K semantic segmentation. The code is available at https://github.com/ryongithub/GatedPromptTuning.

We present a simple, fully-convolutional model for real-time instance segmentation that achieves 29.8 mAP on MS COCO at 33.5 fps evaluated on a single Titan Xp, which is significantly faster than any previous competitive approach. Moreover, we obtain this result after training on only one GPU. We accomplish this by breaking instance segmentation into two parallel subtasks: (1) generating a set of prototype masks and (2) predicting per-instance mask coefficients. Then we produce instance masks by linearly combining the prototypes with the mask coefficients. We find that because this process doesn't depend on repooling, this approach produces very high-quality masks and exhibits temporal stability for free. Furthermore, we analyze the emergent behavior of our prototypes and show they learn to localize instances on their own in a translation variant manner, despite being fully-convolutional. Finally, we also propose Fast NMS, a drop-in 12 ms faster replacement for standard NMS that only has a marginal performance penalty.

Visual prompt learning, as a newly emerged technique, leverages the knowledge learned by a large-scale pre-trained model and adapts it to downstream tasks through the usage of prompts. While previous research has focused on designing effective prompts, in this work, we argue that compared to prompt design, a good mapping strategy matters more. In this sense, we propose SeMap, a more effective mapping using the semantic alignment between the pre-trained model's knowledge and the downstream task. Our experimental results show that SeMap can largely boost the performance of visual prompt learning. Moreover, our experiments show that SeMap is capable of achieving competitive zero-shot transfer, indicating that it can perform the downstream task without any fine-tuning on the corresponding dataset. This demonstrates the potential of our proposed method to be used in a broader range of applications where the zero-shot transfer is desired. Results suggest that our proposed SeMap could lead to significant advancements in both visual prompt learning and zero-shot transfer. We hope with SeMap, we can help the community move forward to more efficient and lightweight utilization of large vision models.

Image-text multimodal representation learning aligns data across modalities and enables important medical applications, e.g., image classification, visual grounding, and cross-modal retrieval. In this work, we establish a connection between multimodal representation learning and multiple instance learning. Based on this connection, we propose a generic framework for constructing permutation-invariant score functions with many existing multimodal representation learning approaches as special cases. Furthermore, we use the framework to derive a novel contrastive learning approach and demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art results in several downstream tasks.

Visual analogy learning enables image manipulation through demonstration rather than textual description, allowing users to specify complex transformations difficult to articulate in words. Given a triplet {a, a', b}, the goal is to generate b' such that a : a' :: b : b'. Recent methods adapt text-to-image models to this task using a single Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) module, but they face a fundamental limitation: attempting to capture the diverse space of visual transformations within a fixed adaptation module constrains generalization capabilities. Inspired by recent work showing that LoRAs in constrained domains span meaningful, interpolatable semantic spaces, we propose LoRWeB, a novel approach that specializes the model for each analogy task at inference time through dynamic composition of learned transformation primitives, informally, choosing a point in a "space of LoRAs". We introduce two key components: (1) a learnable basis of LoRA modules, to span the space of different visual transformations, and (2) a lightweight encoder that dynamically selects and weighs these basis LoRAs based on the input analogy pair. Comprehensive evaluations demonstrate our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance and significantly improves generalization to unseen visual transformations. Our findings suggest that LoRA basis decompositions are a promising direction for flexible visual manipulation. Code and data are in https://research.nvidia.com/labs/par/lorweb

Multimodal representation learning models have demonstrated successful operation across complex tasks, and the integration of vision-language models (VLMs) has further enabled embedding models with instruction-following capabilities. However, existing embedding models lack visual-interactive capabilities to specify regions of interest from users (e.g., point, bounding box, mask), which have been explored in generative models to broaden their human-interactive applicability. Equipping embedding models with visual interactions not only would unlock new applications with localized grounding of user intent, which remains unexplored, but also enable the models to learn entity-level information within images to complement their global representations for conventional embedding tasks. In this paper, we propose a novel Visual-InteRactive Text-Image Universal Embedder (VIRTUE) that extends the capabilities of the segmentation model and the vision-language model to the realm of representation learning. In VIRTUE, the segmentation model can process visual prompts that pinpoint specific regions within an image, thereby enabling the embedder to handle complex and ambiguous scenarios more precisely. To evaluate the visual-interaction ability of VIRTUE, we introduce a large-scale Segmentation-and-Scene Caption Retrieval (SCaR) benchmark comprising 1M samples that aims to retrieve the text caption by jointly considering the entity with a specific object and image scene. VIRTUE consistently achieves a state-of-the-art performance with significant improvements across 36 universal MMEB (3.1%-8.5%) and five visual-interactive SCaR (15.2%-20.3%) tasks.

We introduce Open3DIS, a novel solution designed to tackle the problem of Open-Vocabulary Instance Segmentation within 3D scenes. Objects within 3D environments exhibit diverse shapes, scales, and colors, making precise instance-level identification a challenging task. Recent advancements in Open-Vocabulary scene understanding have made significant strides in this area by employing class-agnostic 3D instance proposal networks for object localization and learning queryable features for each 3D mask. While these methods produce high-quality instance proposals, they struggle with identifying small-scale and geometrically ambiguous objects. The key idea of our method is a new module that aggregates 2D instance masks across frames and maps them to geometrically coherent point cloud regions as high-quality object proposals addressing the above limitations. These are then combined with 3D class-agnostic instance proposals to include a wide range of objects in the real world. To validate our approach, we conducted experiments on three prominent datasets, including ScanNet200, S3DIS, and Replica, demonstrating significant performance gains in segmenting objects with diverse categories over the state-of-the-art approaches.

Traditional computer vision generally solves each single task independently by a dedicated model with the task instruction implicitly designed in the model architecture, arising two limitations: (1) it leads to task-specific models, which require multiple models for different tasks and restrict the potential synergies from diverse tasks; (2) it leads to a pre-defined and fixed model interface that has limited interactivity and adaptability in following user' task instructions. To address them, Visual Instruction Tuning (VIT) has been intensively studied recently, which finetunes a large vision model with language as task instructions, aiming to learn from a wide range of vision tasks described by language instructions a general-purpose multimodal model that can follow arbitrary instructions and thus solve arbitrary tasks specified by the user. This work aims to provide a systematic review of visual instruction tuning, covering (1) the background that presents computer vision task paradigms and the development of VIT; (2) the foundations of VIT that introduce commonly used network architectures, visual instruction tuning frameworks and objectives, and evaluation setups and tasks; (3) the commonly used datasets in visual instruction tuning and evaluation; (4) the review of existing VIT methods that categorizes them with a taxonomy according to both the studied vision task and the method design and highlights the major contributions, strengths, and shortcomings of them; (5) the comparison and discussion of VIT methods over various instruction-following benchmarks; (6) several challenges, open directions and possible future works in visual instruction tuning research.

We present a new method for synthesizing high-resolution photo-realistic images from semantic label maps using conditional generative adversarial networks (conditional GANs). Conditional GANs have enabled a variety of applications, but the results are often limited to low-resolution and still far from realistic. In this work, we generate 2048x1024 visually appealing results with a novel adversarial loss, as well as new multi-scale generator and discriminator architectures. Furthermore, we extend our framework to interactive visual manipulation with two additional features. First, we incorporate object instance segmentation information, which enables object manipulations such as removing/adding objects and changing the object category. Second, we propose a method to generate diverse results given the same input, allowing users to edit the object appearance interactively. Human opinion studies demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms existing methods, advancing both the quality and the resolution of deep image synthesis and editing.

Visual grounding refers to the ability of a model to identify a region within some visual input that matches a textual description. Consequently, a model equipped with visual grounding capabilities can target a wide range of applications in various domains, including referring expression comprehension, answering questions pertinent to fine-grained details in images or videos, caption visual context by explicitly referring to entities, as well as low and high-level control in simulated and real environments. In this survey paper, we review representative works across the key areas of research on modern general-purpose vision language models (VLMs). We first outline the importance of grounding in VLMs, then delineate the core components of the contemporary paradigm for developing grounded models, and examine their practical applications, including benchmarks and evaluation metrics for grounded multimodal generation. We also discuss the multifaceted interrelations among visual grounding, multimodal chain-of-thought, and reasoning in VLMs. Finally, we analyse the challenges inherent to visual grounding and suggest promising directions for future research.

Visual programming languages (VPLs) allow users to create programs through graphical interfaces, which results in easier accessibility and their widespread usage in various domains. To further enhance this accessibility, recent research has focused on generating VPL code from user instructions using large language models (LLMs). Specifically, by employing prompting-based methods, these studies have shown promising results. Nevertheless, such approaches can be less effective for industrial VPLs such as Ladder Diagram (LD). LD is a pivotal language used in industrial automation processes and involves extensive domain-specific configurations, which are difficult to capture in a single prompt. In this work, we demonstrate that training-based methods outperform prompting-based methods for LD generation accuracy, even with smaller backbone models. Building on these findings, we propose a two-stage training strategy to further enhance VPL generation. First, we employ retrieval-augmented fine-tuning to leverage the repetitive use of subroutines commonly seen in industrial VPLs. Second, we apply direct preference optimization (DPO) to further guide the model toward accurate outputs, using systematically generated preference pairs through graph editing operations. Extensive experiments on real-world LD data demonstrate that our approach improves program-level accuracy by over 10% compared to supervised fine-tuning, which highlights its potential to advance industrial automation.

Vision foundation models have been explored recently to build general-purpose vision systems. However, predominant paradigms, driven by casting instance-level tasks as an object-word alignment, bring heavy cross-modality interaction, which is not effective in prompting object detection and visual grounding. Another line of work that focuses on pixel-level tasks often encounters a large annotation gap of things and stuff, and suffers from mutual interference between foreground-object and background-class segmentation. In stark contrast to the prevailing methods, we present APE, a universal visual perception model for aligning and prompting everything all at once in an image to perform diverse tasks, i.e., detection, segmentation, and grounding, as an instance-level sentence-object matching paradigm. Specifically, APE advances the convergence of detection and grounding by reformulating language-guided grounding as open-vocabulary detection, which efficiently scales up model prompting to thousands of category vocabularies and region descriptions while maintaining the effectiveness of cross-modality fusion. To bridge the granularity gap of different pixel-level tasks, APE equalizes semantic and panoptic segmentation to proxy instance learning by considering any isolated regions as individual instances. APE aligns vision and language representation on broad data with natural and challenging characteristics all at once without task-specific fine-tuning. The extensive experiments on over 160 datasets demonstrate that, with only one-suit of weights, APE outperforms (or is on par with) the state-of-the-art models, proving that an effective yet universal perception for anything aligning and prompting is indeed feasible. Codes and trained models are released at https://github.com/shenyunhang/APE.

Visuals are valuable tools for teaching math word problems (MWPs), helping young learners interpret textual descriptions into mathematical expressions before solving them. However, creating such visuals is labor-intensive and there is a lack of automated methods to support this process. In this paper, we present Math2Visual, an automatic framework for generating pedagogically meaningful visuals from MWP text descriptions. Math2Visual leverages a pre-defined visual language and a design space grounded in interviews with math teachers, to illustrate the core mathematical relationships in MWPs. Using Math2Visual, we construct an annotated dataset of 1,903 visuals and evaluate Text-to-Image (TTI) models for their ability to generate visuals that align with our design. We further fine-tune several TTI models with our dataset, demonstrating improvements in educational visual generation. Our work establishes a new benchmark for automated generation of pedagogically meaningful visuals and offers insights into key challenges in producing multimodal educational content, such as the misrepresentation of mathematical relationships and the omission of essential visual elements.

This work investigates descriptive captions as an additional source of supervision for biological multimodal foundation models. Images and captions can be viewed as complementary samples from the latent morphospace of a species, each capturing certain biological traits. Incorporating captions during training encourages alignment with this shared latent structure, emphasizing potentially diagnostic characters while suppressing spurious correlations. The main challenge, however, lies in obtaining faithful, instance-specific captions at scale. This requirement has limited the utilization of natural language supervision in organismal biology compared with many other scientific domains. We complement this gap by generating synthetic captions with multimodal large language models (MLLMs), guided by Wikipedia-derived visual information and taxon-tailored format examples. These domain-specific contexts help reduce hallucination and yield accurate, instance-based descriptive captions. Using these captions, we train BIOCAP (i.e., BIOCLIP with Captions), a biological foundation model that captures rich semantics and achieves strong performance in species classification and text-image retrieval. These results demonstrate the value of descriptive captions beyond labels in bridging biological images with multimodal foundation models.

Visual grounding tasks aim to localize image regions based on natural language references. In this work, we explore whether generative VLMs predominantly trained on image-text data could be leveraged to scale up the text annotation of visual grounding data. We find that grounding knowledge already exists in generative VLM and can be elicited by proper prompting. We thus prompt a VLM to generate object-level descriptions by feeding it object regions from existing object detection datasets. We further propose attribute modeling to explicitly capture the important object attributes, and spatial relation modeling to capture inter-object relationship, both of which are common linguistic pattern in referring expression. Our constructed dataset (500K images, 1M objects, 16M referring expressions) is one of the largest grounding datasets to date, and the first grounding dataset with purely model-generated queries and human-annotated objects. To verify the quality of this data, we conduct zero-shot transfer experiments to the popular RefCOCO benchmarks for both referring expression comprehension (REC) and segmentation (RES) tasks. On both tasks, our model significantly outperform the state-of-the-art approaches without using human annotated visual grounding data. Our results demonstrate the promise of generative VLM to scale up visual grounding in the real world. Code and models will be released.

State-of-the-art vision-language models (VLMs) still have limited performance in structural knowledge extraction, such as relations between objects. In this work, we present ViStruct, a training framework to learn VLMs for effective visual structural knowledge extraction. Two novel designs are incorporated. First, we propose to leverage the inherent structure of programming language to depict visual structural information. This approach enables explicit and consistent representation of visual structural information of multiple granularities, such as concepts, relations, and events, in a well-organized structured format. Second, we introduce curriculum-based learning for VLMs to progressively comprehend visual structures, from fundamental visual concepts to intricate event structures. Our intuition is that lower-level knowledge may contribute to complex visual structure understanding. Furthermore, we compile and release a collection of datasets tailored for visual structural knowledge extraction. We adopt a weakly-supervised approach to directly generate visual event structures from captions for ViStruct training, capitalizing on abundant image-caption pairs from the web. In experiments, we evaluate ViStruct on visual structure prediction tasks, demonstrating its effectiveness in improving the understanding of visual structures. The code is public at https://github.com/Yangyi-Chen/vi-struct.

Prompt engineering is a powerful tool used to enhance the performance of pre-trained models on downstream tasks. For example, providing the prompt ``Let's think step by step" improved GPT-3's reasoning accuracy to 63% on MutiArith while prompting ``a photo of" filled with a class name enables CLIP to achieve 80\% zero-shot accuracy on ImageNet. While previous research has explored prompt learning for the visual modality, analyzing what constitutes a good visual prompt specifically for image recognition is limited. In addition, existing visual prompt tuning methods' generalization ability is worse than text-only prompting tuning. This paper explores our key insight: synthetic text images are good visual prompts for vision-language models! To achieve that, we propose our LoGoPrompt, which reformulates the classification objective to the visual prompt selection and addresses the chicken-and-egg challenge of first adding synthetic text images as class-wise visual prompts or predicting the class first. Without any trainable visual prompt parameters, experimental results on 16 datasets demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods in few-shot learning, base-to-new generalization, and domain generalization.

Humans can learn to operate the user interface (UI) of an application by reading an instruction manual or how-to guide. Along with text, these resources include visual content such as UI screenshots and images of application icons referenced in the text. We explore how to leverage this data to learn generic visio-linguistic representations of UI screens and their components. These representations are useful in many real applications, such as accessibility, voice navigation, and task automation. Prior UI representation models rely on UI metadata (UI trees and accessibility labels), which is often missing, incompletely defined, or not accessible. We avoid such a dependency, and propose Lexi, a pre-trained vision and language model designed to handle the unique features of UI screens, including their text richness and context sensitivity. To train Lexi we curate the UICaption dataset consisting of 114k UI images paired with descriptions of their functionality. We evaluate Lexi on four tasks: UI action entailment, instruction-based UI image retrieval, grounding referring expressions, and UI entity recognition.

GUI grounding, the task of identifying a precise location on an interface image from a natural language query, plays a crucial role in enhancing the capabilities of Vision-Language Model (VLM) agents. While general VLMs, such as GPT-4V, demonstrate strong performance across various tasks, their proficiency in GUI grounding remains suboptimal. Recent studies have focused on fine-tuning these models specifically for one-shot GUI grounding, yielding significant improvements over baseline performance. We introduce a visual prompting framework called Iterative Narrowing (IN) to further enhance the performance of both general and fine-tuned models in GUI grounding. For evaluation, we tested our method on a comprehensive benchmark comprising different UI platforms.

Visual grouping -- operationalized via instance segmentation, visual grounding, and object detection -- underpins applications from robotic perception to photo editing. Large annotated datasets are costly, biased in coverage, and hard to scale. Synthetic data are promising but often lack flexibility, accuracy, and compositional diversity. We present SOS, a simple and scalable data synthesis pipeline based on an object-centric composition strategy. It pastes high-quality synthetic object segments into new images using structured layout priors and generative relighting, producing accurate and diverse masks, boxes, and referring expressions. Models trained on 100000 synthetic images from SOS outperform those trained on larger real-image datasets such as GRIT (20M) and V3Det (200K) on detection and grounding tasks, achieving +10.9 AP on LVIS detection and +8.4 N_{Acc} on gRefCOCO grounding. SOS enables controllable dataset construction and improves generalization in both low-data and closed-vocabulary settings. Augmenting LVIS and COCO with synthetic object segments yields strong performance across real-data scales and even larger gains under extremely limited real data (for example, +3.83 AP_{rare} on LVIS instance segmentation and +6.59 AP with a 1 percent COCO setup). This controllability also supports targeted data generation for challenging intra-class referring in visual grounding.

We simplify space binding by focusing on two core components, a single encoder per modality and high-quality data; enabling training state-of-the-art models on a single GPU in a few hours as opposed to multiple days. We present EBind, an Easy, data-centric, and parameter-efficient method to Bind the embedding spaces of multiple contrastive models. We demonstrate that a simple 1.8B-parameter image-text-video-audio-3D model can outperform models 4 to 17x the size. The key to achieving this is a carefully curated dataset of three complementary data sources: i) 6.7M fully-automated multimodal quintuples sourced via SOTA retrieval models, ii) 1M diverse, semi-automated triples annotated by humans as negative, partial, or positive matches, and iii) 3.4M pre-existing captioned data items. We use 13 different evaluations to demonstrate the value of each data source. Due to limitations with existing benchmarks, we further introduce the first high-quality, consensus-annotated zero-shot classification benchmark between audio and PCs. In contrast to related work, we will open-source our code, model weights, and datasets.

The rapid advancement of Large Vision-Language models (LVLMs) has demonstrated a spectrum of emergent capabilities. Nevertheless, current models only focus on the visual content of a single scenario, while their ability to associate instances across different scenes has not yet been explored, which is essential for understanding complex visual content, such as movies with multiple characters and intricate plots. Towards movie understanding, a critical initial step for LVLMs is to unleash the potential of character identities memory and recognition across multiple visual scenarios. To achieve the goal, we propose visual instruction tuning with ID reference and develop an ID-Aware Large Vision-Language Model, IDA-VLM. Furthermore, our research introduces a novel benchmark MM-ID, to examine LVLMs on instance IDs memory and recognition across four dimensions: matching, location, question-answering, and captioning. Our findings highlight the limitations of existing LVLMs in recognizing and associating instance identities with ID reference. This paper paves the way for future artificial intelligence systems to possess multi-identity visual inputs, thereby facilitating the comprehension of complex visual narratives like movies.

3D Visual Grounding (3DVG) aims at localizing 3D object based on textual descriptions. Conventional supervised methods for 3DVG often necessitate extensive annotations and a predefined vocabulary, which can be restrictive. To address this issue, we propose a novel visual programming approach for zero-shot open-vocabulary 3DVG, leveraging the capabilities of large language models (LLMs). Our approach begins with a unique dialog-based method, engaging with LLMs to establish a foundational understanding of zero-shot 3DVG. Building on this, we design a visual program that consists of three types of modules, i.e., view-independent, view-dependent, and functional modules. These modules, specifically tailored for 3D scenarios, work collaboratively to perform complex reasoning and inference. Furthermore, we develop an innovative language-object correlation module to extend the scope of existing 3D object detectors into open-vocabulary scenarios. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our zero-shot approach can outperform some supervised baselines, marking a significant stride towards effective 3DVG.

User interface (UI) design is an iterative process in which designers progressively refine their work with design software such as Figma or Sketch. Recent advances in vision language models (VLMs) with tool invocation suggest these models can operate design software to edit a UI design through iteration. Understanding and enhancing this capacity is important, as it highlights VLMs' potential to collaborate with designers within conventional software. However, as no existing benchmark evaluates tool-based design performance, the capacity remains unknown. To address this, we introduce CANVAS, a benchmark for VLMs on tool-based user interface design. Our benchmark contains 598 tool-based design tasks paired with ground-truth references sampled from 3.3K mobile UI designs across 30 function-based categories (e.g., onboarding, messaging). In each task, a VLM updates the design step-by-step through context-based tool invocations (e.g., create a rectangle as a button background), linked to design software. Specifically, CANVAS incorporates two task types: (i) design replication evaluates the ability to reproduce a whole UI screen; (ii) design modification evaluates the ability to modify a specific part of an existing screen. Results suggest that leading models exhibit more strategic tool invocations, improving design quality. Furthermore, we identify common error patterns models exhibit, guiding future work in enhancing tool-based design capabilities.

Visual designers naturally draw inspiration from multiple visual references, combining diverse elements and aesthetic principles to create artwork. However, current image generative frameworks predominantly rely on single-source inputs -- either text prompts or individual reference images. In this paper, we focus on the task of controllable image generation using multiple visual references. We introduce MultiRef-bench, a rigorous evaluation framework comprising 990 synthetic and 1,000 real-world samples that require incorporating visual content from multiple reference images. The synthetic samples are synthetically generated through our data engine RefBlend, with 10 reference types and 33 reference combinations. Based on RefBlend, we further construct a dataset MultiRef containing 38k high-quality images to facilitate further research. Our experiments across three interleaved image-text models (i.e., OmniGen, ACE, and Show-o) and six agentic frameworks (e.g., ChatDiT and LLM + SD) reveal that even state-of-the-art systems struggle with multi-reference conditioning, with the best model OmniGen achieving only 66.6% in synthetic samples and 79.0% in real-world cases on average compared to the golden answer. These findings provide valuable directions for developing more flexible and human-like creative tools that can effectively integrate multiple sources of visual inspiration. The dataset is publicly available at: https://multiref.github.io/.

Modern Vision-Language Models (VLMs) remain poorly characterized in multi-step visual interactions, particularly in how they integrate perception, memory, and action over long horizons. We introduce VisGym, a gymnasium of 17 environments for evaluating and training VLMs. The suite spans symbolic puzzles, real-image understanding, navigation, and manipulation, and provides flexible controls over difficulty, input representation, planning horizon, and feedback. We also provide multi-step solvers that generate structured demonstrations, enabling supervised finetuning. Our evaluations show that all frontier models struggle in interactive settings, achieving low success rates in both the easy (46.6%) and hard (26.0%) configurations. Our experiments reveal notable limitations: models struggle to effectively leverage long context, performing worse with an unbounded history than with truncated windows. Furthermore, we find that several text-based symbolic tasks become substantially harder once rendered visually. However, explicit goal observations, textual feedback, and exploratory demonstrations in partially observable or unknown-dynamics settings for supervised finetuning yield consistent gains, highlighting concrete failure modes and pathways for improving multi-step visual decision-making. Code, data, and models can be found at: https://visgym.github.io/.

Advanced generative models excel at synthesizing images but often rely on text-based conditioning. Visual designers, however, often work beyond language, directly drawing inspiration from existing visual elements. In many cases, these elements represent only fragments of a potential concept-such as an uniquely structured wing, or a specific hairstyle-serving as inspiration for the artist to explore how they can come together creatively into a coherent whole. Recognizing this need, we introduce a generative framework that seamlessly integrates a partial set of user-provided visual components into a coherent composition while simultaneously sampling the missing parts needed to generate a plausible and complete concept. Our approach builds on a strong and underexplored representation space, extracted from IP-Adapter+, on which we train IP-Prior, a lightweight flow-matching model that synthesizes coherent compositions based on domain-specific priors, enabling diverse and context-aware generations. Additionally, we present a LoRA-based fine-tuning strategy that significantly improves prompt adherence in IP-Adapter+ for a given task, addressing its common trade-off between reconstruction quality and prompt adherence.

We investigate the efficacy of visual prompting to adapt large-scale models in vision. Following the recent approach from prompt tuning and adversarial reprogramming, we learn a single image perturbation such that a frozen model prompted with this perturbation performs a new task. Through comprehensive experiments, we demonstrate that visual prompting is particularly effective for CLIP and robust to distribution shift, achieving performance competitive with standard linear probes. We further analyze properties of the downstream dataset, prompt design, and output transformation in regard to adaptation performance. The surprising effectiveness of visual prompting provides a new perspective on adapting pre-trained models in vision. Code is available at http://hjbahng.github.io/visual_prompting .

Recent breakthroughs in diffusion models, multimodal pretraining, and efficient finetuning have led to an explosion of text-to-image generative models. Given human evaluation is expensive and difficult to scale, automated methods are critical for evaluating the increasingly large number of new models. However, most current automated evaluation metrics like FID or CLIPScore only offer a holistic measure of image quality or image-text alignment, and are unsuited for fine-grained or instance-level analysis. In this paper, we introduce GenEval, an object-focused framework to evaluate compositional image properties such as object co-occurrence, position, count, and color. We show that current object detection models can be leveraged to evaluate text-to-image models on a variety of generation tasks with strong human agreement, and that other discriminative vision models can be linked to this pipeline to further verify properties like object color. We then evaluate several open-source text-to-image models and analyze their relative generative capabilities on our benchmark. We find that recent models demonstrate significant improvement on these tasks, though they are still lacking in complex capabilities such as spatial relations and attribute binding. Finally, we demonstrate how GenEval might be used to help discover existing failure modes, in order to inform development of the next generation of text-to-image models. Our code to run the GenEval framework is publicly available at https://github.com/djghosh13/geneval.

Infographic charts are a powerful medium for communicating abstract data by combining visual elements (e.g., charts, images) with textual information. However, their visual and structural richness poses challenges for large vision-language models (LVLMs), which are typically trained on plain charts. To bridge this gap, we introduce ChartGalaxy, a million-scale dataset designed to advance the understanding and generation of infographic charts. The dataset is constructed through an inductive process that identifies 75 chart types, 330 chart variations, and 68 layout templates from real infographic charts and uses them to create synthetic ones programmatically. We showcase the utility of this dataset through: 1) improving infographic chart understanding via fine-tuning, 2) benchmarking code generation for infographic charts, and 3) enabling example-based infographic chart generation. By capturing the visual and structural complexity of real design, ChartGalaxy provides a useful resource for enhancing multimodal reasoning and generation in LVLMs.

Diffusion-based generative models have significantly advanced text-to-image generation but encounter challenges when processing lengthy and intricate text prompts describing complex scenes with multiple objects. While excelling in generating images from short, single-object descriptions, these models often struggle to faithfully capture all the nuanced details within longer and more elaborate textual inputs. In response, we present a novel approach leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) to extract critical components from text prompts, including bounding box coordinates for foreground objects, detailed textual descriptions for individual objects, and a succinct background context. These components form the foundation of our layout-to-image generation model, which operates in two phases. The initial Global Scene Generation utilizes object layouts and background context to create an initial scene but often falls short in faithfully representing object characteristics as specified in the prompts. To address this limitation, we introduce an Iterative Refinement Scheme that iteratively evaluates and refines box-level content to align them with their textual descriptions, recomposing objects as needed to ensure consistency. Our evaluation on complex prompts featuring multiple objects demonstrates a substantial improvement in recall compared to baseline diffusion models. This is further validated by a user study, underscoring the efficacy of our approach in generating coherent and detailed scenes from intricate textual inputs.

Recent advancements in Large Vision-Language Models are accelerating the development of Graphical User Interface (GUI) agents that utilize human-like vision perception capabilities to enhance productivity on digital devices. Compared to approaches predicated on GUI metadata, which are platform-dependent and vulnerable to implementation variations, vision-based approaches offer broader applicability. In this vision-based paradigm, the GUI instruction grounding, which maps user instruction to the location of corresponding element on the given screenshot, remains a critical challenge, particularly due to limited public training dataset and resource-intensive manual instruction data annotation. In this paper, we delve into unexplored challenges in this task including element-to-screen ratio, unbalanced element type, and implicit instruction. To address these challenges, we introduce a large-scale data synthesis pipeline UI-E2I-Synth for generating varying complex instruction datasets using GPT-4o instead of human annotators. Furthermore, we propose a new GUI instruction grounding benchmark UI-I2E-Bench, which is designed to address the limitations of existing benchmarks by incorporating diverse annotation aspects. Our model, trained on the synthesized data, achieves superior performance in GUI instruction grounding, demonstrating the advancements of proposed data synthesis pipeline. The proposed benchmark, accompanied by extensive analyses, provides practical insights for future research in GUI grounding. We will release corresponding artifacts at https://colmon46.github.io/i2e-bench-leaderboard/ .

We present T-Rex2, a highly practical model for open-set object detection. Previous open-set object detection methods relying on text prompts effectively encapsulate the abstract concept of common objects, but struggle with rare or complex object representation due to data scarcity and descriptive limitations. Conversely, visual prompts excel in depicting novel objects through concrete visual examples, but fall short in conveying the abstract concept of objects as effectively as text prompts. Recognizing the complementary strengths and weaknesses of both text and visual prompts, we introduce T-Rex2 that synergizes both prompts within a single model through contrastive learning. T-Rex2 accepts inputs in diverse formats, including text prompts, visual prompts, and the combination of both, so that it can handle different scenarios by switching between the two prompt modalities. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that T-Rex2 exhibits remarkable zero-shot object detection capabilities across a wide spectrum of scenarios. We show that text prompts and visual prompts can benefit from each other within the synergy, which is essential to cover massive and complicated real-world scenarios and pave the way towards generic object detection. Model API is now available at https://github.com/IDEA-Research/T-Rex.

Open-world instance segmentation is the task of grouping pixels into object instances without any pre-determined taxonomy. This is challenging, as state-of-the-art methods rely on explicit class semantics obtained from large labeled datasets, and out-of-domain evaluation performance drops significantly. Here we propose a novel approach for mask proposals, Generic Grouping Networks (GGNs), constructed without semantic supervision. Our approach combines a local measure of pixel affinity with instance-level mask supervision, producing a training regimen designed to make the model as generic as the data diversity allows. We introduce a method for predicting Pairwise Affinities (PA), a learned local relationship between pairs of pixels. PA generalizes very well to unseen categories. From PA we construct a large set of pseudo-ground-truth instance masks; combined with human-annotated instance masks we train GGNs and significantly outperform the SOTA on open-world instance segmentation on various benchmarks including COCO, LVIS, ADE20K, and UVO. Code is available on project website: https://sites.google.com/view/generic-grouping/.

Video editing increasingly demands the ability to incorporate specific real-world instances into existing footage, yet current approaches fundamentally fail to capture the unique visual characteristics of particular subjects and ensure natural instance/scene interactions. We formalize this overlooked yet critical editing paradigm as "Get-In-Video Editing", where users provide reference images to precisely specify visual elements they wish to incorporate into videos. Addressing this task's dual challenges, severe training data scarcity and technical challenges in maintaining spatiotemporal coherence, we introduce three key contributions. First, we develop GetIn-1M dataset created through our automated Recognize-Track-Erase pipeline, which sequentially performs video captioning, salient instance identification, object detection, temporal tracking, and instance removal to generate high-quality video editing pairs with comprehensive annotations (reference image, tracking mask, instance prompt). Second, we present GetInVideo, a novel end-to-end framework that leverages a diffusion transformer architecture with 3D full attention to process reference images, condition videos, and masks simultaneously, maintaining temporal coherence, preserving visual identity, and ensuring natural scene interactions when integrating reference objects into videos. Finally, we establish GetInBench, the first comprehensive benchmark for Get-In-Video Editing scenario, demonstrating our approach's superior performance through extensive evaluations. Our work enables accessible, high-quality incorporation of specific real-world subjects into videos, significantly advancing personalized video editing capabilities.

A key challenge in evaluating VLMs is testing models' ability to analyze visual content independently from their textual priors. Recent benchmarks such as BLINK probe visual perception through visual prompting, where questions about visual content are paired with coordinates to which the question refers, with the coordinates explicitly marked in the image itself. While these benchmarks are an important part of VLM evaluation, we find that existing models are surprisingly fragile to seemingly irrelevant details of visual prompting: simply changing a visual marker from red to blue can completely change rankings among models on a leaderboard. By evaluating nine commonly-used open- and closed-source VLMs on two visually prompted tasks, we demonstrate how details in benchmark setup, including visual marker design and dataset size, have a significant influence on model performance and leaderboard rankings. These effects can even be exploited to lift weaker models above stronger ones; for instance, slightly increasing the size of the visual marker results in open-source InternVL3-8B ranking alongside or better than much larger proprietary models like Gemini 2.5 Pro. We further show that low-level inference choices that are often ignored in benchmarking, such as JPEG compression levels in API calls, can also cause model lineup changes. These details have substantially larger impacts on visually prompted benchmarks than on conventional semantic VLM evaluations. To mitigate this instability, we curate existing datasets to create VPBench, a larger visually prompted benchmark with 16 visual marker variants. We open-source VPBench and our analysis framework at: https://lisadunlap.github.io/vpbench/.

An image editing model should be able to perform diverse edits, ranging from object replacement, changing attributes or style, to performing actions or movement, which require many forms of reasoning. Current general instruction-guided editing models have significant shortcomings with action and reasoning-centric edits. Object, attribute or stylistic changes can be learned from visually static datasets. On the other hand, high-quality data for action and reasoning-centric edits is scarce and has to come from entirely different sources that cover e.g. physical dynamics, temporality and spatial reasoning. To this end, we meticulously curate the AURORA Dataset (Action-Reasoning-Object-Attribute), a collection of high-quality training data, human-annotated and curated from videos and simulation engines. We focus on a key aspect of quality training data: triplets (source image, prompt, target image) contain a single meaningful visual change described by the prompt, i.e., truly minimal changes between source and target images. To demonstrate the value of our dataset, we evaluate an AURORA-finetuned model on a new expert-curated benchmark (AURORA-Bench) covering 8 diverse editing tasks. Our model significantly outperforms previous editing models as judged by human raters. For automatic evaluations, we find important flaws in previous metrics and caution their use for semantically hard editing tasks. Instead, we propose a new automatic metric that focuses on discriminative understanding. We hope that our efforts : (1) curating a quality training dataset and an evaluation benchmark, (2) developing critical evaluations, and (3) releasing a state-of-the-art model, will fuel further progress on general image editing.

Recently introduced ControlNet has the ability to steer the text-driven image generation process with geometric input such as human 2D pose, or edge features. While ControlNet provides control over the geometric form of the instances in the generated image, it lacks the capability to dictate the visual appearance of each instance. We present FineControlNet to provide fine control over each instance's appearance while maintaining the precise pose control capability. Specifically, we develop and demonstrate FineControlNet with geometric control via human pose images and appearance control via instance-level text prompts. The spatial alignment of instance-specific text prompts and 2D poses in latent space enables the fine control capabilities of FineControlNet. We evaluate the performance of FineControlNet with rigorous comparison against state-of-the-art pose-conditioned text-to-image diffusion models. FineControlNet achieves superior performance in generating images that follow the user-provided instance-specific text prompts and poses compared with existing methods. Project webpage: https://samsunglabs.github.io/FineControlNet-project-page

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) perform well on many vision-language tasks but often struggle with vision-centric problems that require fine-grained visual reasoning. Recent evidence suggests that this limitation arises not from weak visual representations, but from under-utilization of visual information during instruction tuning, where many tasks can be partially solved using language priors alone. We propose a simple and lightweight approach that augments visual instruction tuning with a small number of visually grounded self-supervised tasks expressed as natural language instructions. By reformulating classical self-supervised pretext tasks, such as rotation prediction, color matching, and cross-view correspondence, as image-instruction-response triplets, we introduce supervision that cannot be solved without relying on visual evidence. Our approach requires no human annotations, no architectural modifications, and no additional training stages. Across multiple models, training regimes, and benchmarks, injecting only a small fraction (3-10%) of such visually grounded instructions consistently improves performance on vision-centric evaluations. Our findings highlight instruction tuning with visually grounded SSL tasks as a powerful lever for improving visual reasoning in MLLMs through simple adjustments to the training data distribution. Code available at: https://github.com/sirkosophia/V-GIFT

We introduce Point-Bind, a 3D multi-modality model aligning point clouds with 2D image, language, audio, and video. Guided by ImageBind, we construct a joint embedding space between 3D and multi-modalities, enabling many promising applications, e.g., any-to-3D generation, 3D embedding arithmetic, and 3D open-world understanding. On top of this, we further present Point-LLM, the first 3D large language model (LLM) following 3D multi-modal instructions. By parameter-efficient fine-tuning techniques, Point-LLM injects the semantics of Point-Bind into pre-trained LLMs, e.g., LLaMA, which requires no 3D instruction data, but exhibits superior 3D and multi-modal question-answering capacity. We hope our work may cast a light on the community for extending 3D point clouds to multi-modality applications. Code is available at https://github.com/ZiyuGuo99/Point-Bind_Point-LLM.

User interface understanding with vision-language models has received much attention due to its potential for enabling next-generation software automation. However, existing UI datasets either only provide large-scale context-free element annotations or contextualized functional descriptions for elements at a much smaller scale. In this work, we propose the pipeline for automatically annotating UI elements with detailed functionality descriptions at scale. Specifically, we leverage large language models (LLMs) to infer element functionality by comparing the UI content changes before and after simulated interactions with specific UI elements. To improve annotation quality, we propose LLM-aided rejection and verification, eliminating invalid and incorrect annotations without human labor. We construct an -704k dataset using the proposed pipeline, featuring multi-resolution, multi-device screenshots, diverse data domains, and detailed functionality annotations that have never been provided by previous datasets. Human evaluation shows that the AutoGUI pipeline achieves annotation correctness comparable to trained human annotators. Extensive experimental results show that our -704k dataset remarkably enhances VLM's UI grounding capabilities, exhibits significant scaling effects, and outperforms existing web pre-training data types. We envision AutoGUI as a scalable pipeline for generating massive data to build GUI-oriented VLMs. AutoGUI dataset can be viewed at this anonymous URL: https://autogui-project.github.io/.

Visual prompting techniques are widely used to efficiently fine-tune pretrained Vision Transformers (ViT) by learning a small set of shared prompts for all tokens. However, existing methods overlook the unique roles of different tokens in conveying discriminative information and interact with all tokens using the same prompts, thereby limiting the representational capacity of ViT. This often leads to indistinguishable and biased prompt-extracted features, hindering performance. To address this issue, we propose a plug-and-play Token Coordinated Prompt Attention (TCPA) module, which assigns specific coordinated prompts to different tokens for attention-based interactions. Firstly, recognizing the distinct functions of CLS and image tokens-global information aggregation and local feature extraction, we disentangle the prompts into CLS Prompts and Image Prompts, which interact exclusively with CLS tokens and image tokens through attention mechanisms. This enhances their respective discriminative abilities. Furthermore, as different image tokens correspond to distinct image patches and contain diverse information, we employ a matching function to automatically assign coordinated prompts to individual tokens. This enables more precise attention interactions, improving the diversity and representational capacity of the extracted features. Extensive experiments across various benchmarks demonstrate that TCPA significantly enhances the diversity and discriminative power of the extracted features. The code is available at https://github.com/zhoujiahuan1991/ICML2025-TCPA.

We introduce the novel Diffusion Visual Programmer (DVP), a neuro-symbolic image translation framework. Our proposed DVP seamlessly embeds a condition-flexible diffusion model within the GPT architecture, orchestrating a coherent sequence of visual programs (i.e., computer vision models) for various pro-symbolic steps, which span RoI identification, style transfer, and position manipulation, facilitating transparent and controllable image translation processes. Extensive experiments demonstrate DVP's remarkable performance, surpassing concurrent arts. This success can be attributed to several key features of DVP: First, DVP achieves condition-flexible translation via instance normalization, enabling the model to eliminate sensitivity caused by the manual guidance and optimally focus on textual descriptions for high-quality content generation. Second, the framework enhances in-context reasoning by deciphering intricate high-dimensional concepts in feature spaces into more accessible low-dimensional symbols (e.g., [Prompt], [RoI object]), allowing for localized, context-free editing while maintaining overall coherence. Last but not least, DVP improves systemic controllability and explainability by offering explicit symbolic representations at each programming stage, empowering users to intuitively interpret and modify results. Our research marks a substantial step towards harmonizing artificial image translation processes with cognitive intelligence, promising broader applications.