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

59 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. CVPR 2025Decoupled Motion Expression Video Segmentation
16. CVPR 2025Dr. Splat: Directly Referring 3D Gaussian Splatting via Direct Language Embedding Registration
17. CVPR 2025DViN: Dynamic Visual Routing Network for Weakly Supervised Referring Expression Comprehension
18. CVPR 2025Exploring Contextual Attribute Density in Referring Expression Counting
19. CVPR 2025Foveated Instance Segmentation
20. CVPR 2025Hybrid Global-Local Representation with Augmented Spatial Guidance for Zero-Shot Referring Image Segmentation
21. CVPR 2025OFER: Occluded Face Expression Reconstruction
22. CVPR 2025Scene-Centric Unsupervised Panoptic Segmentation
23. CVPR 2025Unified Medical Lesion Segmentation via Self-referring Indicator
24. CVPR 2025WeakMCN: Multi-task Collaborative Network for Weakly Supervised Referring Expression Comprehension and Segmentation
25. CVPR 2024COCONut: Modernizing COCO Segmentation
26. CVPR 2024Curriculum Point Prompting for Weakly-Supervised Referring Image Segmentation
27. CVPR 2024Decoupling Static and Hierarchical Motion Perception for Referring Video Segmentation
28. CVPR 2024GSVA: Generalized Segmentation via Multimodal Large Language Models
29. CVPR 2024Hierarchical Histogram Threshold Segmentation - Auto-terminating High-detail Oversegmentation
30. CVPR 2024LASO: Language-guided Affordance Segmentation on 3D Object
31. CVPR 2024LoSh: Long-Short Text Joint Prediction Network for Referring Video Object Segmentation
32. CVPR 2024LQMFormer: Language-aware Query Mask Transformer for Referring Image Segmentation
33. CVPR 2024Mask Grounding for Referring Image Segmentation
34. CVPR 2024MirageRoom: 3D Scene Segmentation with 2D Pre-trained Models by Mirage Projection
35. CVPR 2024Mudslide: A Universal Nuclear Instance Segmentation Method
36. CVPR 2024NeRF-HuGS: Improved Neural Radiance Fields in Non-static Scenes Using Heuristics-Guided Segmentation
37. CVPR 2024Prompt-Driven Referring Image Segmentation with Instance Contrasting
38. CVPR 2024Referring Expression Counting
39. CVPR 2024Revisiting Counterfactual Problems in Referring Expression Comprehension
40. CVPR 2024Rotated Multi-Scale Interaction Network for Referring Remote Sensing Image Segmentation
41. CVPR 2024ScanFormer: Referring Expression Comprehension by Iteratively Scanning
42. CVPR 2024Universal Segmentation at Arbitrary Granularity with Language Instruction
43. CVPR 2024Unveiling Parts Beyond Objects: Towards Finer-Granularity Referring Expression Segmentation
44. CVPR 2024Zero-shot Referring Expression Comprehension via Structural Similarity Between Images and Captions
45. CVPR 2023A Soma Segmentation Benchmark in Full Adult Fly Brain
46. CVPR 2023Camouflaged Instance Segmentation via Explicit De-Camouflaging
47. CVPR 2023Contrastive Grouping With Transformer for Referring Image Segmentation
48. CVPR 2023Few-Shot Referring Relationships in Videos
49. CVPR 2023GRES: Generalized Referring Expression Segmentation
50. CVPR 2023Label-Free Liver Tumor Segmentation

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.