Referring Image Segmentation

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1 paper in the last four weeks, down 67% on the four weeks before. 0.0% of all new papers.

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0.5%>100%: Bidirectional Reciprocal Learning for Referring Image Segmentation
Sep 21, 2026Xiaoqiang Lu, Licheng Jiao, Lingling Li +5VLM Adaptation Vision Foundation Model Adaptation
Key Laboratory of Intelligent Perception and Image Understanding of Ministry of Education, International Research Center for Intelligent Perception and Computation, School of Artificial Intelligence, Xidian University, Xi’an, Shaanxi Province, 710071, China
Cost-efficient Active Learning for Referring Image Segmentation and Grounding
Aug 31, 2026Junbeom Hong, Seonghoon Yu, Hyung Rok Jung +2Active Learning Referring Image Segmentation
1Meissa · 2KAIST · 3GIST +1
GeoRefer-Bench: A Benchmark from Referring Pixels to Verifiable Geospatial Reasoning
Aug 25, 2026Shuaishuai Cao, Min Huang, Meng Tang +3Spatial Reasoning Benchmarks Geospatial Reasoning
Central South University · Jiangxi Normal University · Hohai University +2
DiCoR: Decoupled Referent Disambiguation and Contour Recalibration for Efficient Referring Remote Sensing Image Segmentation
Aug 13, 2026Ziyang Gao, Zhizhuo Jiang, Jingjing Chang +5Remote Sensing Image Segmentation Referring Image Segmentation
School of Integrated Circuits, School of Information Science and Electronic Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai 200240, China · College of Computer Science, Nankai University, Tianjin 300350, China · Department of Electronic Engineering, Tsinghua Shenzhen International Graduate School, Tsinghua University, Shenzhen 518055, China +1
AeroReformer2: Spoken-Query Referring Segmentation for Aerial Images
Aug 9, 2026Rui Li, Chenxi Duan, Haoyang YangRemote Sensing Image Segmentation Remote Sensing
EgoAfford: Task-Oriented Affordance Grounding via Egocentric Referring Segmentation
Aug 5, 2026Xinyuan Guan, Feifan Chen, Xinyu Zhan +3Multimodal Grounding Large Language Model-Based Robot Planning
Shanghai Jiao Tong University · Shanghai Innovation Institute · Noematrix Ltd
CROSS: Cascaded Distillation and Dual-Constraint Grounding for Remote Sensing Referring Segmentation
Aug 4, 2026Tingzhang Luo, Ruizhong Liu, Yichao Liu +3Referring Image Segmentation
City University of Hong Kong · The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou) · Nankai University +1
Better, Stronger, Faster, and Broader: Structured All-Mask Prediction for MLLM-Based Segmentation
Aug 3, 2026Jiazhen Liu, Mingkuan Feng, Long ChenEfficient Multimodal Inference Image Segmentation
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST), Hong Kong.
VespaSeg: A Resource-Aware Ground-then-Segment Pipeline for Referring Expression Segmentation
Aug 2, 2026Savindu Dilshan WickramasinghePromptable Image Segmentation Efficient VLM Inference
University of Moratuwa · Department of Electronic and Telecommunication Engineering, University of Moratuwa Moratuwa, Sri Lanka
GFR-SAM: Training-Free Referring Camouflaged Object Segmentation via Cross-Image Prompting
Jul 13, 2026Yilong Yang, Jianxin Tian, Shengchuan Zhang +1Image Segmentation Promptable Image Segmentation
Key Laboratory of Multimedia Trusted Perception and Efficient Computing, Ministry of Education of China, Xiamen University
Actor as Its Own Critic: Unifying Region Understanding and Localization via CycleGRPO
Jul 13, 2026Xin Zhang, Haochen Wang, Yikang Zhou +3Group Relative Policy Optimization Multimodal Large Language Models
National University of Singapore · ByteDance
Attribute Retrieving for Open-Vocabulary Endoscopic Compositional Referring Segmentation
Jul 9, 2026Shun Liu, Nan Xi, Yang Liu +3Endoscopy Medical Imaging
Virginia Commonwealth University · King’s College London · University at Buffalo +1
Seek to Segment: Active Perception for Panoramic Referring Segmentation
Jul 2, 2026Song Tang, Shuming Hu, Xincheng Shuai +2Active Perception Referring Image Segmentation
Fudan University, China
Venice-H1: Failure-Aware Query Re-Ranking with Multi-Scale Grid Signatures for Referring Image Segmentation
Jun 21, 2026Nicolò SavioliLearning to Rank Referring Image Segmentation
OdaxAI Research
An Open-Source Benchmark and Baseline for Multi-temporal Referring Segmentation
May 31, 2026Bingyu Li, Da Zhang, Tao Huo +3Large Vision-Language Models Referring Image Segmentation
University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, China · Institute of Artificial Intelligence (TeleAI), China Telecom, China · School of Artificial Intelligence, Optics and Electronics (iOPEN), Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi’an 710072, China
FlowSeg: Dynamic Semantic Guidance for LLM-Conditioned Segmentation
May 28, 2026Zekang Zhang, Guangyu Gao, Youyun Tang +7Text-Guided Image Segmentation Referring Image Segmentation
School of Computer Science, Beijing Institute of Technology · School of Computer Science, University of Birmingham · WEI Lab, Institute of Information Science, Beijing Jiaotong University +1
PinPoint: Prompting with Informative Interior Points
May 26, 2026Pouya Sadeghi, Shawn He, Pedro Pablo Guerrero Vela +3Image Segmentation Promptable Image Segmentation
University of Waterloo · 2Critical ML, University of Waterloo · 3Apple
Image-Conditioned Instance Prompt Network for Referring Remote Sensing Image Segmentation
May 23, 2026Biaoyu Ren, Qingsheng Wang, Cun Xu +2Remote Sensing Image Segmentation Referring Image Segmentation
School of Computer Science, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi'an, China · School of Computer Science, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi’an, China · College of Intelligent Robotics and Advanced Manufacturing, Fudan University, Shanghai, China +1
B-GRTO: Bootstrapped Group Relative Tool Optimization for Referring Segmentation
May 22, 2026Mario Markov, Stefan Maria Ailuro, Mohammad Mahdi +2Image Segmentation Reinforcement Learning
INSAIT, Sofia University "St. Kliment Ohridski" · INSAIT, Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”
SetCon: Towards Open-Ended Referring Segmentation via Set-Level Concept Prediction
May 19, 2026Zhixiong Zhang, Yizhuo Li, Shuangrui Ding +6Image Segmentation Referring Video Object Segmentation
1Shanghai Jiao Tong University · 2Shanghai Innovation Institute · 3The Chinese University of Hong Kong +3
Semi-MedRef: Semi-Supervised Medical Referring Image Segmentation with Cross-Modal Alignment
May 15, 2026Yuchen Li, Zhen Zhao, Yi Liu +1Interactive Medical Image Segmentation Cross-Modal Alignment
The University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia · Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Shanghai, China · Changzhou University, Changzhou, China
Early Semantic Grounding in Image Editing Models for Zero-Shot Referring Image Segmentation
May 13, 2026Jingxuan He, Xiyu Wang, Yunke Wang +2Image Segmentation Referring Image Segmentation
The University of Sydney
ChartREG++: Towards Benchmarking and Improving Chart Referring Expression Grounding under Diverse referring clues and Multi-Target Referring
May 8, 2026Tianhao Niu, Ziyu Han, Xuan Dong +2Referring Image Segmentation Visual Grounding
Research Center for Social Computing and Interactive Robotics Harbin Institute of Technology, China
X2SAM: Any Segmentation in Images and Videos
Apr 27, 2026Hao Wang, Limeng Qiao, Chi Zhang +4Image Segmentation Video Object Segmentation
Sun Yat-Sen University · 2 Peng Cheng Laboratory · 3 Meituan Inc
Channel Attention-Guided Cross-Modal Knowledge Distillation for Referring Image Segmentation
Apr 18, 2026Chen YangCross-Modal Learning Cross-Modal Knowledge Distillation
School of Information Science and Technology, TaiShan University, Taian, China
RefAM: Attention Magnets for Zero-Shot Referral Segmentation
Sep 26, 2025Anna Kukleva, Enis Simsar, Alessio Tonioni +4Zero-Shot Learning Image Segmentation
Max Planck Institute for Informatics, SIC · ETH Zürich · Google +1

Sep 21, 2026, cs.CVJ/K move · Enter open · S save

0.5%>100%: Bidirectional Reciprocal Learning for Referring Image Segmentation

Xiaoqiang Lu, Licheng Jiao, Lingling Li, Yuting Yang+4

Key Laboratory of Intelligent Perception and Image Understanding of Ministry of Education, International Research Center for Intelligent Perception and Computation, School of Artificial Intelligence, Xidian University, Xi’an, Shaanxi Province, 710071, China

VLM Adaptation Vision Foundation Model Adaptation Referring Image Segmentation Vision-Language Alignment Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning

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Recent advances in vision foundation models (VFMs) have shown remarkable capabilities across diverse unimodal visual tasks. However, adapting VFMs to referring image segmentation (RIS) typically necessitates precise vision-language alignment via full fine-tuning, incurring substantial computational overhead and risking catastrophic forgetting. While existing parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods enable safe knowledge transfer with minimal training costs, they predominantly operate independently within individual modalities or focus exclusively on unidirectional guidance from language to vision, overlooking progressive cross-modal interaction and visual feedback for textual refinement. To address these limitations, we propose

\textbf{B}

idirectional

\textbf{R}

eciprocal

\textbf{L}

earning (

\textbf{BRL}

), a novel adapter-based PEFT framework that facilitates hierarchical, bidirectional information flow within both token-mixing and channel-mixing layers of frozen foundation models. Specifically, BRL introduces two complementary lightweight modules. The Reciprocal Attention Adapter (RAA) performs cross-modal query-key exchanges at the token level, enabling visual and linguistic tokens to mutually attend to each other for fine-grained spatial grounding. The Reciprocal Gate Adapter (RGA) generates cross-modal gating signals at the channel level, allowing global semantic context from one modality to adaptively recalibrate channel activations of the other. Extensive experiments on RefCOCO, RefCOCO+, and RefCOCOg benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of BRL over prior RIS methods, achieving state-of-the-art performance while requiring less than 0.5% backbone parameter updates. Code and models will be released at https://github.com/xiaoqiang-lu/BRL.

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