RSVG-ZeroOV: Exploring a Training-Free Framework for Zero-Shot Open-Vocabulary Visual Grounding in Remote Sensing Images

Abstract: Remote sensing visual grounding (RSVG) aims to localize objects in remote sensing images based on free-form natural language expressions. Existing approaches are typically constrained to closed-set vocabularies, limiting their applicability in open-world scenarios. While recent attempts to leverage generic foundation models for open-vocabulary RSVG, they overly rely on expensive high-quality datasets and time-consuming fine-tuning. To address these limitations, we propose \textbf{RSVG-ZeroOV}, a training-free framework that aims to explore the potential of frozen generic foundation models for zero-shot open-vocabulary RSVG. Specifically, RSVG-ZeroOV comprises three key stages: (i) Overview: We utilize a vision-LLM (VLM) to obtain cross-attention\footnote[1]{In this paper, although decoder-only VLMs use self-attention over all tokens, we refer to the image-text interaction part as cross-attention to distinguish it from pure visual self-attention.}maps that capture semantic correlations between text queries and visual regions. (ii) Focus: By leveraging the fine-grained modeling priors of a diffusion model (DM), we fill in gaps in structural and shape information of objects, which are often overlooked by VLM. (iii) Evolve: A simple yet effective attention evolution module is introduced to suppress irrelevant activations, yielding purified segmentation masks over the referred objects. Without cumbersome task-specific training, RSVG-ZeroOV offers an efficient and scalable solution. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed framework consistently outperforms existing weakly-supervised and zero-shot methods.