Iterative shrinking for referring expression grounding using deep reinforcement learning

Mingjie Sun, Jimin Xiao*, Eng Gee Lim

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Chapter in Book or Report/Conference proceedingConference Proceedingpeer-review

29 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

In this paper, we are tackling the proposal-free referring expression grounding task, aiming at localizing the target object according to a query sentence, without relying on off-the-shelf object proposals. Existing proposal-free methods employ a query-image matching branch to select the highest-score point in the image feature map as the target box center, with its width and height predicted by another branch. Such methods, however, fail to utilize the contextual relation between the target and reference objects, and lack interpretability on its reasoning procedure. To solve these problems, we propose an iterative shrinking mechanism to localize the target, where the shrinking direction is decided by a reinforcement learning agent, with all contents within the current image patch comprehensively considered. Besides, the sequential shrinking processes enable to demonstrate the reasoning about how to iteratively find the target. Experiments show that the proposed method boosts the accuracy by 4.32% against the previous state-of-the-art (SOTA) method on the RefCOCOg dataset, where query sentences are long and complex with many targets referred by other reference objects.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings - 2021 IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, CVPR 2021
PublisherIEEE Computer Society
Pages14055-14064
Number of pages10
ISBN (Electronic)9781665445092
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2021
Event2021 IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, CVPR 2021 - Virtual, Online, United States
Duration: 19 Jun 202125 Jun 2021

Publication series

NameProceedings of the IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
ISSN (Print)1063-6919

Conference

Conference2021 IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, CVPR 2021
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityVirtual, Online
Period19/06/2125/06/21

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