Referring Expression papers, 2023–2026

Key findings

• Referring Expression went from 18 papers in 2023 to 27 in 2026, roughly 1.5x in three years.
• CVPR publishes the most Referring Expression work: 59 papers from 2023 to 2026, 64% of the four-venue total.
• The fastest-growing overlap is with 3D Vision: papers tagged with both rose from 0 in 2023 to 7 in 2026.
• Among the 5 topics under Open-Vocabulary Vision, it ranks #5 by 2026 paper count; the fastest grower in the group, Visual Grounding, is up 4.3x versus 1.5x here.

Representative papers

Spread across years and venues so every edition shows up

• NeurIPS 2026EviSAM3: Evidence-Driven SAM3 for Referring Remote Sensing Image Segmentation
• ICML 2026Position Is All You Need: A Free Lunch Token Compression Strategy for MLLM-based Referring Expression Segmentation
• ICLR 2026Ref-Adv: Exploring MLLM Visual Reasoning in Referring Expression Tasks
• CVPR 2026CLEX Complementary Label Exchange Learning for Noisy Facial Expression Recognition
• NeurIPS 2025Learning Relative Gene Expression Trends from Pathology Images in Spatial Transcriptomics
• ICML 2025ReferSplat: Referring Segmentation in 3D Gaussian Splatting
• ICLR 2025LLM-wrapper: Black-Box Semantic-Aware Adaptation of Vision-Language Models for Referring Expression Comprehension
• CVPR 2025Decoupled Motion Expression Video Segmentation
• NeurIPS 2024A Large-Scale Human-Centric Benchmark for Referring Expression Comprehension in the LMM Era
• ICML 2024SAM as the Guide: Mastering Pseudo-Label Refinement in Semi-Supervised Referring Expression Segmentation
• ICLR 2024BarLeRIa: An Efficient Tuning Framework for Referring Image Segmentation
• CVPR 2024Decoupling Static and Hierarchical Motion Perception for Referring Video Segmentation
• NeurIPS 2023Segment Everything Everywhere All at Once
• CVPR 2023Contrastive Grouping With Transformer for Referring Image Segmentation
• NeurIPS 2026LeCellModel: Interpretable Density Estimation over the Gene Expression Manifold
• ICML 2026ViSurf: Visual Supervised-and-Reinforcement Fine-Tuning for Large Vision-and-Language Models
• ICLR 2026Patch-as-Decodable-Token: Towards Unified Multi-Modal Vision Tasks in MLLMs
• CVPR 2026InterRVOS Interaction-Aware Referring Video Object Segmentation
• NeurIPS 2025RESAnything: Attribute Prompting for Arbitrary Referring Segmentation
• ICLR 2025Text4Seg: Reimagining Image Segmentation as Text Generation

All Referring Expression papers

92 papers, page 1 of 2

1. CVPR 2026Adapting a Pre-trained Single-Cell Foundation Model to Spatial Gene Expression
2. CVPR 2026Cell-Type Prototype-Informed Neural Network for Gene Expression Estimation from Pathology
3. CVPR 2026CLEX Complementary Label Exchange Learning for Noisy Facial Expression Recognition
4. CVPR 2026From Pixel to Precision Enhancing Handwritten Mathematical Expression Recognition with
5. CVPR 2026Geometry-Aware Cross-Modal Graph Alignment for Referring Segmentation in 3D Gaussian
6. CVPR 2026InterRVOS Interaction-Aware Referring Video Object Segmentation
7. CVPR 2026Long-RVOS A Comprehensive Benchmark for Long-term Referring Video Object Segmentation
8. CVPR 2026MVGGT Multimodal Visual Geometry Grounded Transformer for Multiview 3D Referring
9. CVPR 2026Photo-Guided Tooth Segmentation on 3D Oral Scan Model
10. CVPR 2026Rethinking MLLM Itself as a Segmenter with a Single Segmentation
11. CVPR 2026SAQN Semantic-based Adaptive Query Network for 3D Referring Expression Segmentation
12. CVPR 2026Spatial Matters Position-Guided 3D Referring Expression Segmentation
13. CVPR 2026ST4R-Splat Spatio-Temporal Referring Segmentation in 4D Gaussian Splatting
14. CVPR 2026Towards Streaming Referring Video Segmentation via Large Language Model
15. ICLR 2026AMLRIS: Alignment-aware Masked Learning for Referring Image Segmentation
16. ICLR 2026Patch-as-Decodable-Token: Towards Unified Multi-Modal Vision Tasks in MLLMs
17. ICLR 2026Ref-Adv: Exploring MLLM Visual Reasoning in Referring Expression Tasks
18. ICLR 2026Referring Layer Decomposition
19. ICLR 2026Rewarding Doubt: A Reinforcement Learning Approach to Calibrated Confidence Expression of Large Language Models
20. ICML 2026Position Is All You Need: A Free Lunch Token Compression Strategy for MLLM-based Referring Expression Segmentation
21. ICML 2026ViSurf: Visual Supervised-and-Reinforcement Fine-Tuning for Large Vision-and-Language Models
22. NeurIPS 2026EviSAM3: Evidence-Driven SAM3 for Referring Remote Sensing Image Segmentation
23. NeurIPS 2026LaSA-Net: A Language-Guided Network for Outdoor Generalized 3D Referring Expression Segmentation
24. NeurIPS 2026LeCellModel: Interpretable Density Estimation over the Gene Expression Manifold
25. NeurIPS 2026SetCon: Towards Open-Ended Referring Segmentation via Set-Level Concept Prediction
26. NeurIPS 2026Shift-Aware Identity-Guided Latent Refinement for Referring Audio–Visual Segmentation
27. NeurIPS 2026Walking Through 3D Spaces: Spatial Routing for Referring 3D Gaussian Splatting Segmentation
28. CVPR 2025Decoupled Motion Expression Video Segmentation
29. CVPR 2025Dr. Splat: Directly Referring 3D Gaussian Splatting via Direct Language Embedding Registration
30. CVPR 2025DViN: Dynamic Visual Routing Network for Weakly Supervised Referring Expression Comprehension
31. CVPR 2025Exploring Contextual Attribute Density in Referring Expression Counting
32. CVPR 2025Foveated Instance Segmentation
33. CVPR 2025Hybrid Global-Local Representation with Augmented Spatial Guidance for Zero-Shot Referring Image Segmentation
34. CVPR 2025OFER: Occluded Face Expression Reconstruction
35. CVPR 2025Scene-Centric Unsupervised Panoptic Segmentation
36. CVPR 2025Unified Medical Lesion Segmentation via Self-referring Indicator
37. CVPR 2025WeakMCN: Multi-task Collaborative Network for Weakly Supervised Referring Expression Comprehension and Segmentation
38. ICLR 2025LLM-wrapper: Black-Box Semantic-Aware Adaptation of Vision-Language Models for Referring Expression Comprehension
39. ICLR 2025Text4Seg: Reimagining Image Segmentation as Text Generation
40. ICML 2025ReferSplat: Referring Segmentation in 3D Gaussian Splatting
41. NeurIPS 2025Learning Relative Gene Expression Trends from Pathology Images in Spatial Transcriptomics
42. NeurIPS 2025PRESCRIBE: Predicting Single-Cell Responses with Bayesian Estimation
43. NeurIPS 2025RESAnything: Attribute Prompting for Arbitrary Referring Segmentation
44. NeurIPS 2025SaFiRe: Saccade-Fixation Reiteration with Mamba for Referring Image Segmentation
45. NeurIPS 2025UniPixel: Unified Object Referring and Segmentation for Pixel-Level Visual Reasoning
46. CVPR 2024COCONut: Modernizing COCO Segmentation
47. CVPR 2024Curriculum Point Prompting for Weakly-Supervised Referring Image Segmentation
48. CVPR 2024Decoupling Static and Hierarchical Motion Perception for Referring Video Segmentation
49. CVPR 2024GSVA: Generalized Segmentation via Multimodal Large Language Models
50. CVPR 2024Hierarchical Histogram Threshold Segmentation - Auto-terminating High-detail Oversegmentation

FAQ

How many Referring Expression papers were published at NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML and CVPR from 2023 to 2026?

92 in total: 18 in 2023, 29 in 2024, 18 in 2025, 27 in 2026.

How many Referring Expression papers are at NeurIPS 2026?

NeurIPS 2026 has 6 Referring Expression papers, versus 5 the year before.

How many Referring Expression papers are at ICLR 2026?

ICLR 2026 has 5 Referring Expression papers, versus 2 the year before.

How many Referring Expression papers are at ICML 2026?

ICML 2026 has 2 Referring Expression papers, versus 1 the year before.

How many Referring Expression papers are at CVPR 2026?

CVPR 2026 has 14 Referring Expression papers, versus 10 the year before.

Which conference publishes the most Referring Expression papers?

CVPR, with 59 papers from 2023 to 2026.