NICE: Improving Panoptic Narrative Detection and Segmentation with Cascading Collaborative Learning

TL;DR

NICE introduces a unified framework with cascading modules that jointly improve panoptic narrative detection and segmentation by leveraging barycenter-based alignment, surpassing existing methods significantly.

Contribution

The paper proposes a novel cascading collaborative learning framework that effectively aligns and jointly learns PND and PNS tasks using barycenter-based modules.

Findings

NICE achieves 4.1% improvement in PND accuracy.

NICE achieves 2.9% improvement in PNS accuracy.

The framework outperforms all existing methods on benchmark datasets.

Abstract

Panoptic Narrative Detection (PND) and Segmentation (PNS) are two challenging tasks that involve identifying and locating multiple targets in an image according to a long narrative description. In this paper, we propose a unified and effective framework called NICE that can jointly learn these two panoptic narrative recognition tasks. Existing visual grounding tasks use a two-branch paradigm, but applying this directly to PND and PNS can result in prediction conflict due to their intrinsic many-to-many alignment property. To address this, we introduce two cascading modules based on the barycenter of the mask, which are Coordinate Guided Aggregation (CGA) and Barycenter Driven Localization (BDL), responsible for segmentation and detection, respectively. By linking PNS and PND in series with the barycenter of segmentation as the anchor, our approach naturally aligns the two tasks and allows them to complement each other for improved performance. Specifically, CGA provides the barycenter as a reference for detection, reducing BDL's reliance on a large number of candidate boxes. BDL leverages its excellent properties to distinguish different instances, which improves the performance of CGA for segmentation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that NICE surpasses all existing methods by a large margin, achieving 4.1% for PND and 2.9% for PNS over the state-of-the-art. These results validate the effectiveness of our proposed collaborative learning strategy. The project of this work is made publicly available at https://github.com/Mr-Neko/NICE.