Grid-augmented vision: A simple yet effective approach for enhanced spatial understanding in multi-modal agents

Recent advances in multimodal models have demonstrated impressive capabilities in object recognition and scene understanding. However, these models often struggle with precise spatial localization - a critical capability for real-world applications. Inspired by how humans use grid-based references like chess boards and maps, we propose introducing explicit visual position encoding through a simple grid overlay approach. By adding a 9x9 black grid pattern onto input images, our method provides visual spatial guidance analogous to how positional encoding works in transformers, but in an explicit, visual form. Experiments on the COCO 2017 dataset demonstrate that our grid-based approach achieves significant improvements in localization accuracy, with a 107.4% increase in IoU (from 0.27 to 0.56) and a 194.4% improvement in GIoU (from 0.18 to 0.53) compared to baseline performance. Through attention visualization analysis, we show how this visual position encoding helps models better ground spatial relationships. Our method's simplicity and effectiveness make it particularly valuable for applications requiring accurate spatial reasoning, such as robotic manipulation, medical imaging, and autonomous navigation.

SJTU:Spatial judgments in multimodal models towards unified segmentation through coordinate detection

Despite advances in vision-language understanding, implementing image segmentation within multimodal architectures remains a fundamental challenge in modern artificial intelligence systems. Existing vision-language models, which primarily rely on backbone architectures or CLIP-based embedding learning, demonstrate inherent limitations in fine-grained spatial localization and operational capabilities. This paper introduces SJTU: Spatial Judgments in multimodal models - Towards Unified segmentation through coordinate detection, a novel framework that leverages spatial coordinate understanding to bridge vision-language interaction and precise segmentation, enabling accurate target identification through natural language instructions. The framework proposes a novel approach for integrating segmentation techniques with vision-language models based on multimodal spatial inference. By leveraging normalized coordinate detection for bounding boxes and translating it into actionable segmentation outputs, we explore the possibility of integrating multimodal spatial and language representations. Based on the proposed technical approach, the framework demonstrates superior performance on various benchmark datasets as well as accurate object segmentation. Results on the COCO 2017 dataset for general object detection and Pascal VOC datasets for semantic segmentation demonstrate the generalization capabilities of the framework.