Interpretable Open-Vocabulary Referring Object Detection with Reverse Contrast Attention

Code

• github.com/earl-juanico/rca
  OfficialIn paper★ 0

Abstract

We propose Reverse Contrast Attention (RCA), a plug-in method that enhances object localization in vision-language transformers without retraining. RCA reweights final-layer attention by suppressing extremes and amplifying mid-level activations to let semantically relevant but subdued tokens guide predictions. We evaluate it on Open Vocabulary Referring Object Detection (OV-RefOD), introducing FitAP, a confidence-free average precision metric based on IoU and box area. RCA improves FitAP in 11 out of 15 open-source VLMs, with gains up to +26.6\%. Effectiveness aligns with attention sharpness and fusion timing; while late-fusion models benefit consistently, models like DeepSeek-VL2 also improve, pointing to capacity and disentanglement as key factors. RCA offers both interpretability and performance gains for multimodal transformers. Codes and dataset are available from https://github.com/earl-juanico/rca

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