Referring Expression Segmentation (RES) aims to generate a segmentation mask for the object described by a given language expression. Existing classic RES datasets and methods commonly support single-target expressions only, i.e., one expression refers to one target object. Multi-target and no-target expressions are not considered. This limits the usage of RES in practice. In this paper, we introduce a new benchmark called Generalized Referring Expression Segmentation (GRES), which extends the classic RES to allow expressions to refer to an arbitrary number of target objects. Towards this, we construct the first large-scale GRES dataset called gRefCOCO that contains multi-target, no-target, and single-target expressions. GRES and gRefCOCO are designed to be well-compatible with RES, facilitating extensive experiments to study the performance gap of the existing RES methods on the GRES task. In the experimental study, we find that one of the big challenges of GRES is complex relationship modeling. Based on this, we propose a region-based GRES baseline ReLA that adaptively divides the image into regions with sub-instance clues, and explicitly models the region-region and region-language dependencies. The proposed approach ReLA achieves new state-of-the-art performance on the both newly proposed GRES and classic RES tasks. The proposed gRefCOCO dataset and method are available at https://henghuiding.github.io/GRES.

本文介绍了一个新的基准测试 Generalized Referring Expression Segmentation (GRES)，它允许表达式引用任意数量的目标对象，为此我们构建了第一个大规模数据集 gRefCOCO，并提出一种基于区域的 GRES 基线 ReLA，它适应性地将图像划分为具有子实例线索的区域，并明确建模区域-区域和区域-语言之间的依赖关系，在实验研究中，发现 GRES 的一个重要挑战是复杂的关系建模，而基于区域的方法 ReLA 在新提出的 GRES 和经典的 RES 任务上实现了最新的性能水平。

广义指称表达分割