Context Does Matter: End-to-end Panoptic Narrative Grounding with Deformable Attention Refined Matching Network

Panoramic Narrative Grounding (PNG) is an emerging visual grounding task that aims to segment visual objects in images based on dense narrative captions. The current state-of-the-art methods first refine the representation of phrase by aggregating the most similar k image pixels, and then match the refined text representations with the pixels of the image feature map to generate segmentation results. However, simply aggregating sampled image features ignores the contextual information, which can lead to phrase-to-pixel mis-match. In this paper, we propose a novel learning framework called Deformable Attention Refined Matching Network (DRMN), whose main idea is to bring deformable attention in the iterative process of feature learning to incorporate essential context information of different scales of pixels. DRMN iteratively re-encodes pixels with the deformable attention network after updating the feature representation of the top-k most similar pixels. As such, DRMN can lead to accurate yet discriminative pixel representations, purify the top-k most similar pixels, and consequently alleviate the phrase-to-pixel mis-match substantially. Experimental results show that our novel design significantly improves the matching results between text phrases and image pixels. Concretely, DRMN achieves new state-of-the-art performance on the PNG benchmark with an average recall improvement 3.5%. The codes are available in: https://github.com/JaMesLiMers/DRMN.