ABACUS: Adapting Unified Foundation Model for Bridging Image Count Understanding and Generation
Anindya Mondal, Sauradip Nag, Anjan Dutta
Abstract
ABACUS is a unified vision-language model that handles object counting, crowd counting, referring-expression counting, and count-faithful image generation without any benchmark-specific training required. Our model is built on existing 3B-parameter unified foundation model and is adapted for object localization tasks using three key innovations: density-aware adaptive zooming with objectness maps for spatial grounding; a boundary-aware count policy via GRPO to eliminate crop-boundary errors; and a cycle-consistent GRPO strategy where the understanding branch self-critiques generated outputs, closing the understanding-generation gap without any external annotations. ABACUS achieves state-of-the-art results across seven benchmarks, outperforming both task-specific specialists and larger generalist models.
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Classified with taxonomy v2 on Sat, 5 Sept 2026.