Iterative Robust Visual Grounding with Masked Reference based
  Centerpoint Supervision
Menghao Li Chunlei Wang Wenquan Feng Shuchang Lyu Guangliang Cheng Xiangtai Li Binghao Liu Qi Zhao
Visual Grounding (VG) aims at localizing target objects from an image based
on given expressions and has made significant progress with the development of
detection and vision transformer. However, existing VG methods tend to generate
false-alarm objects when presented with inaccurate or irrelevant descriptions,
which commonly occur in practical applications. Moreover, existing methods fail
to capture fine-grained features, accurate localization, and sufficient context
comprehension from the whole image and textual descriptions. To address both
issues, we propose an Iterative Robust Visual Grounding (IR-VG) framework with
Masked Reference based Centerpoint Supervision (MRCS). The framework introduces
iterative multi-level vision-language fusion (IMVF) for better alignment. We
use MRCS to ahieve more accurate localization with point-wised feature
supervision. Then, to improve the robustness of VG, we also present a
multi-stage false-alarm sensitive decoder (MFSD) to prevent the generation of
false-alarm objects when presented with inaccurate expressions. The proposed
framework is evaluated on five regular VG datasets and two newly constructed
robust VG datasets. Extensive experiments demonstrate that IR-VG achieves new
state-of-the-art (SOTA) results, with improvements of 25\% and 10\% compared to
existing SOTA approaches on the two newly proposed robust VG datasets.
Moreover, the proposed framework is also verified effective on five regular VG
datasets. Codes and models will be publicly at
https://github.com/cv516Buaa/IR-VG.