A Unified Mutual Supervision Framework for Referring Expression Segmentation and Generation

Reference Expression Segmentation (RES) and Reference Expression Generation (REG) are mutually inverse tasks that can be naturally jointly trained. Though recent work has explored such joint training, the mechanism of how RES and REG can benefit each other is still unclear. In this paper, we propose a unified mutual supervision framework that enables two tasks to improve each other. Our mutual supervision contains two directions. On the one hand, Disambiguation Supervision leverages the expression unambiguity measurement provided by RES to enhance the language generation of REG. On the other hand, Generation Supervision uses expressions automatically generated by REG to scale up the training of RES. Such unified mutual supervision effectively improves two tasks by solving their bottleneck problems. Extensive experiments show that our approach significantly outperforms all existing methods on REG and RES tasks under the same setting, and detailed ablation studies demonstrate the effectiveness of all components in our framework.