Generation and Comprehension Hand-in-Hand: Vision-guided Expression Diffusion for Boosting Referring Expression Generation and Comprehension

Referring expression generation (REG) and comprehension (REC) are vital and complementary in joint visual and textual reasoning. Existing REC datasets typically contain insufficient image-expression pairs for training, hindering the generalization of REC models to unseen referring expressions. Moreover, REG methods frequently struggle to bridge the visual and textual domains due to the limited capacity, leading to low-quality and restricted diversity in expression generation. To address these issues, we propose a novel VIsion-guided Expression Diffusion Model (VIE-DM) for the REG task, where diverse synonymous expressions adhering to both image and text contexts of the target object are generated to augment REC datasets. VIE-DM consists of a vision-text condition (VTC) module and a transformer decoder. Our VTC and token selection design effectively addresses the feature discrepancy problem prevalent in existing REG methods. This enables us to generate high-quality, diverse synonymous expressions that can serve as augmented data for REC model learning. Extensive experiments on five datasets demonstrate the high quality and large diversity of our generated expressions. Furthermore, the augmented image-expression pairs consistently enhance the performance of existing REC models, achieving state-of-the-art results.