{"ID":2871661,"CreatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.09958","arxiv_id":"2509.09958","title":"Zero-Shot Referring Expression Comprehension via Vison-Language True/False Verification","abstract":"Referring Expression Comprehension (REC) is usually addressed with task-trained grounding models. We show that a zero-shot workflow, without any REC-specific training, can achieve competitive or superior performance. Our approach reformulates REC as box-wise visual-language verification: given proposals from a COCO-clean generic detector (YOLO-World), a general-purpose VLM independently answers True/False queries for each region. This simple procedure reduces cross-box interference, supports abstention and multiple matches, and requires no fine-tuning. On RefCOCO, RefCOCO+, and RefCOCOg, our method not only surpasses a zero-shot GroundingDINO baseline but also exceeds reported results for GroundingDINO trained on REC and GroundingDINO+CRG. Controlled studies with identical proposals confirm that verification significantly outperforms selection-based prompting, and results hold with open VLMs. Overall, we show that workflow design, rather than task-specific pretraining, drives strong zero-shot REC performance.","short_abstract":"Referring Expression Comprehension (REC) is usually addressed with task-trained grounding models. We show that a zero-shot workflow, without any REC-specific training, can achieve competitive or superior performance. Our approach reformulates REC as box-wise visual-language verification: given proposals from a COCO-cle...","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.09958","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.09958v3","authors":"[\"Jeffrey Liu\",\"Rongbin Hu\"]","published":"2025-09-12T04:32:52Z","proceeding":"cs.CV","tasks":"[\"cs.CV\",\"cs.AI\"]","methods":"[]","has_code":false}