Object-Centric Alignment and Anchor Distillation for Weakly Supervised Referring Expression Comprehension
Object-Centric Alignment and Anchor Distillation for Weakly Supervised Referring Expression Comprehension
Yi Tian, Cheng Yang, Qingbao Huang
Proceedings of the Thirty-Fifth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main Track. Pages 1704-1712.
https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2026/190
Weakly supervised Referring Expression Comprehension (WREC) aims to localize referred objects
using only image-text pairs without box-level annotations. Existing one-stage methods predominantly
rely on anchor-level alignment, which suffers from
two fundamental limitations: (1) anchors represent
local visual patches rather than holistic objects, and
(2) they lack the capability to model inter-object
relations. To address these issues, we propose
OCAAD, an Object-Centric Alignment and Anchor Distillation framework. Our key insight is that
different self-attention heads in DINOv2 naturally
attend to distinct semantic regions, effectively capturing object-level information. Building on this,
OCAAD introduces two complementary modules:
(1) Anchor-Object Distillation Module (AODM),
which bridges the semantic gap between anchors
and objects by transferring object-level knowledge
from attention heads to anchors via overlap-aware
contrastive learning; and (2) Intra-Modal Relation Consistency (IRC), which explicitly models
inter-object relations by enforcing the relational
structure among linguistic entities to match that of
their visual counterparts. Extensive experiments on
RefCOCO, RefCOCO+, and RefCOCOg demonstrate that OCAAD achieves new state-of-the-art
performance, validating the effectiveness of objectcentric alignment for WREC. Code is available at
https://github.com/VILAN-Lab/OCAAD.
Keywords:
Computer Vision: Vision, language and reasoning
Machine Learning: Weakly supervised learning
