Visual Grounding for Object Questions

Current visual grounding research remains limited for practical applications, because existing tasks primarily focus on direct visual queries (e.g., “find the red car”) or reading visible text (e.g., “what is the title of this book?”), rather than supporting general questions about objects (e.g., “how comfortable are these earbuds?”). We introduce the novel problem of Visual Grounding for Object Questions (VGOQ). Unlike previous tasks that ground only what is directly visible in images, VGOQ handles open-ended general questions about objects, including concepts such as ease and comfort of use, and aims to identify visual evidence or context that would support an answer. This unexplored problem has immediate practical value, particularly in designing and optimizing product imagery in e-commerce stores. As initial steps toward this task, we develop two automated data generation techniques, which serve to train a lightweight visual grounding model, and to evaluate visual grounding approaches on the resulting synthetic benchmarks, ABO-VGOQ and VizWiz-VGOQ. Our results provide initial evidence that VGOQ represents a meaningful research direction: current SoTA visual grounding performance decreases from 52% gIoU to 37% gIoU when questions are rephrased from visual questions (segmentation of the answer) to general object questions (segmentation of visual evidence). On our new benchmarks, our lightweight model outperforms prior models while being much smaller.