RIO: A Benchmark for Reasoning Intention-Oriented Objects in Open Environments

Intention-oriented object detection aims to detect desired objects based on specific intentions or requirements. For instance, when we desire to "lie down and rest", we instinctively seek out a suitable option such as a "bed" or a "sofa" that can fulfill our needs. Previous work in this area is limited either by the number of intention descriptions or by the affordance vocabulary available for intention objects. These limitations make it challenging to handle intentions in open environments effectively. To facilitate this research, we construct a comprehensive dataset called Reasoning Intention-Oriented Objects (RIO). In particular, RIO is specifically designed to incorporate diverse real-world scenarios and a wide range of object categories. It offers the following key features: 1) intention descriptions in RIO are represented as natural sentences rather than a mere word or verb phrase, making them more practical and meaningful; 2) the intention descriptions are contextually relevant to the scene, enabling a broader range of potential functionalities associated with the objects; 3) the dataset comprises a total of 40,214 images and 130,585 intention-object pairs. With the proposed RIO, we evaluate the ability of some existing models to reason intention-oriented objects in open environments.

SiRi: A Simple Selective Retraining Mechanism for Transformer-based Visual Grounding

In this paper, we investigate how to achieve better visual grounding with modern vision-language transformers, and propose a simple yet powerful Selective Retraining (SiRi) mechanism for this challenging task. Particularly, SiRi conveys a significant principle to the research of visual grounding, i.e., a better initialized vision-language encoder would help the model converge to a better local minimum, advancing the performance accordingly. In specific, we continually update the parameters of the encoder as the training goes on, while periodically re-initialize rest of the parameters to compel the model to be better optimized based on an enhanced encoder. SiRi can significantly outperform previous approaches on three popular benchmarks. Specifically, our method achieves 83.04% Top1 accuracy on RefCOCO+ testA, outperforming the state-of-the-art approaches (training from scratch) by more than 10.21%. Additionally, we reveal that SiRi performs surprisingly superior even with limited training data. We also extend it to transformer-based visual grounding models and other vision-language tasks to verify the validity.