RegionGPT: Towards Region Understanding Vision Language Model

Qiushan Guo, Shalini De Mello, Hongxu Yin, Wonmin Byeon, Ka Chun Cheung, Yizhou Yu, Ping Luo, Sifei Liu; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2024, pp. 13796-13806

Vision language models (VLMs) have experienced rapid advancements through the integration of large language models (LLMs) with image-text pairs yet they struggle with detailed regional visual understanding due to limited spatial awareness of the vision encoder and the use of coarse-grained training data that lacks detailed region-specific captions. To address this we introduce RegionGPT (short as RGPT) a novel framework designed for complex region-level captioning and understanding. RGPT enhances the spatial awareness of regional representation with simple yet effective modifications to existing visual encoders in VLMs. We further improve performance on tasks requiring a specific output scope by integrating task-guided instruction prompts during both training and inference phases while maintaining the model's versatility for general-purpose tasks. Additionally we develop an automated region caption data generation pipeline enriching the training set with detailed region-level captions. We demonstrate that a universal RGPT model can be effectively applied and significantly enhancing performance across a range of region-level tasks including but not limited to complex region descriptions reasoning object classification and referring expressions comprehension.