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LocateAnything: Fast and High-Quality Vision-Language Grounding with Parallel Box Decoding

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AuthorsShihao Wang et al.
Year2026
HF Upvotes130
arXiv2605.27365
PDFDownload
HF PageView on Hugging Face

Abstract

Vision-language models (VLMs) commonly formulate visual grounding and detection as a coordinate-token generation problem, serializing each 2D box into multiple 1D tokens that are learned and decoded largely independently. This token-by-token decoding mismatches the coupled structure of box geometry and creates a practical inference bottleneck due to strictly sequential generation. We introduce LocateAnything, a unified generative grounding and detection framework based on Parallel Box Decoding (PBD). By decoding geometric elements such as bounding boxes and points as atomic units in a single step, LocateAnything preserves intra-box geometric coherence and unlocks substantial parallelism. We show that PBD improves both decoding throughput and localization accuracy. We further develop a scalable data engine and curate LocateAnything-Data, a large-scale dataset with more than 138 million training samples, substantially increasing data diversity for high-precision localization. Extensive evaluations show that LocateAnything advances the speed-accuracy frontier, achieving significantly higher decoding throughput while improving high-IoU localization quality across diverse benchmarks. The results highlight the complementary benefits of Parallel Box Decoding and large-scale training data in enabling efficient and precise unified visual grounding and detection.


Engineering Breakdown

The Problem

Vision-language models (VLMs) commonly formulate visual grounding and detection as a coordinate-token generation problem, serializing each 2D box into multiple 1D tokens that are learned and decoded largely independently.

The Approach

We introduce LocateAnything, a unified generative grounding and detection framework based on Parallel Box Decoding (PBD). We show that PBD improves both decoding throughput and localization accuracy.

Key Results

The results highlight the complementary benefits of Parallel Box Decoding and large-scale training data in enabling efficient and precise unified visual grounding and detection.

Research Areas

This paper contributes to the following areas of AI/ML engineering:

  • Machine learning
  • Deep learning
  • Neural networks
  • Model optimization
  • AI systems
  • Locateanything

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