Language-Guided Salient Object Ranking

Salient Object Ranking (SOR) aims to study human attention shifts across different objects in the scene. It is a challenging task, as it requires comprehension of the relations among the salient objects in the scene. However, existing works often overlook such relations or model them implicitly. In this work, we observe that when Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) describe a scene, they usually focus on the most salient object first, and then discuss the relations as they move on to the next (less salient) one. Based on this observation, we propose a novel Language-Guided Salient Object Ranking approach (named LG-SOR), which utilizes the internal knowledge within the LVLM-generated language descriptions, i.e., semantic relation cues and the implicit entity order cues, to facilitate saliency ranking. Specifically, we first propose a novel Text-Guided Visual Modulation (TGVM) module to incorporate semantic information in the description for saliency ranking. TGVM controls the flow of linguistic information to the visual features, suppresses noisy background image features, and enables propagation of useful textual features. We then propose a novel Text-Aware Visual Reasoning (TAVR) module to enhance model reasoning in object ranking, by explicitly learning a multimodal graph based on the entity and relation cues derived from the description. Extensive experiments demonstrate superior performances of our model on two SOR benchmarks.