PIN: Positional Insert Unlocks Object Localisation Abilities in VLMs
Michael Dorkenwald Nimrod Barazani Cees G. M. Snoek Yuki M. Asano
Vision-Language Models (VLMs), such as Flamingo and GPT-4V, have shown
immense potential by integrating large language models with vision systems.
Nevertheless, these models face challenges in the fundamental computer vision
task of object localisation, due to their training on multimodal data
containing mostly captions without explicit spatial grounding. While it is
possible to construct custom, supervised training pipelines with bounding box
annotations that integrate with VLMs, these result in specialized and
hard-to-scale models. In this paper, we aim to explore the limits of
caption-based VLMs and instead propose to tackle the challenge in a simpler
manner by i) keeping the weights of a caption-based VLM frozen and ii) not
using any supervised detection data. To this end, we introduce an
input-agnostic Positional Insert (PIN), a learnable spatial prompt, containing
a minimal set of parameters that are slid inside the frozen VLM, unlocking
object localisation capabilities. Our PIN module is trained with a simple
next-token prediction task on synthetic data without requiring the introduction
of new output heads. Our experiments demonstrate strong zero-shot localisation
performances on a variety of images, including Pascal VOC, COCO, LVIS, and
diverse images like paintings or cartoons.