HA-FGOVD: Highlighting Fine-Grained Attributes via Explicit Linear Composition for Open-Vocabulary Object Detection

Open-vocabulary object detection (OVD) models are considered to be Large Multi-modal Models (LMM), due to their extensive training data and a large number of parameters. Mainstream OVD models prioritize object coarse-grained category rather than focus on their fine-grained attributes, e.g., colors or materials, thus failed to identify objects specified with certain attributes. Despite being pretrained on large-scale image-text pairs with rich attribute information, their latent feature space does not highlight these fine-grained attributes. In this paper, we introduce HA-FGOVD, a universal and explicit method that enhances the attribute-level detection capabilities of frozen OVD models by highlighting fine-grained attributes in explicit linear space. Our approach uses a LLM to extract attribute words in input text as a zero-shot task. Then, token attention masks are adjusted to guide text encoders in extracting both global and attribute-specific features, which are explicitly composited as two vectors in linear space to form a new attribute-highlighted feature for detection tasks. The composition weight scalars can be learned or transferred across different OVD models, showcasing the universality of our method. Experimental results show that HA-FGOVD achieves state-of-the-art performance on the FG-OVD benchmark and demonstrates promising generalization on the OVDEval benchmark, suggesting that our method addresses significant limitations in fine-grained attribute detection and has potential for broader fine-grained detection applications.