The All-Seeing Project: Towards Panoptic Visual Recognition and Understanding of the Open World
Weiyun WangMin ShiQingyun LiWenhai WangZhenhang HuangLinjie XingZhe ChenHao LiXizhou ZhuZhiguo Cao
Introduces a billion-region dataset covering 3.5 million concepts alongside a unified vision-language model that achieves strong zero-shot performance across region-level recognition, captioning, and question answering in the open world.
Current artificial intelligence systems struggle to perceive and understand specific objects within visual scenes in the same detailed manner that humans do. While modern large language models excel at text reasoning, and visual-language models can interpret whole images, existing models generally fail to comprehend individual visual regions. Progress has been blocked by a scarcity of large-scale, detailed region-level data and a lack of unified models capable of handling both discriminative tasks like object recognition and generative tasks like text captioning.
The article introduces the All-Seeing project to establish a comprehensive framework for panoptic visual recognition and understanding across the open world. It evaluates a semi-automated data generation engine alongside a location-aware multimodal foundation model designed to perceive, identify, and describe arbitrary regions within images.
To overcome the prohibitive expense of manual labeling, the authors built an automated data engine that pairs off-the-shelf vision and language models with human-in-the-loop verification. This engine produced the AS-1B dataset, containing 1.2 billion region annotations across 11 million images, covering 3.5 million concepts and 132.2 billion text tokens. Leveraging this resource, the authors developed the All-Seeing Model (ASM), which combines a location-aware image tokenizer with a large language model decoder to unify region-text alignment and text generation using shared parameters.
The evaluation produced several key findings. First, the resulting dataset provides 33 times more annotated regions and 159 times more open-world concepts than prior benchmarks. Second, in zero-shot object recognition, ASM outperformed standard contrastive models by 10.4 mean Average Precision on COCO and 14.3 on LVIS. Third, ASM achieved state-of-the-art results in region-level and image-level captioning, outperforming concurrent models on benchmarks such as RefCOCOg and Flickr30K. Finally, human evaluations confirmed that ASM generated more informative, accurate, and hallucination-free descriptions than leading competitors.
These results demonstrate that integrating region-level visual grounding with language decoders significantly improves perceptual precision while reducing costly factual errors. Organizations building downstream vision-language applications can leverage this unified approach to reduce training costs and streamline architectures across diverse visual tasks. Teams seeking to adopt this technology should implement iterative human-in-the-loop workflows, as fine-tuning on a small set of human-verified annotations yielded substantial performance gains.
Readers should note that automated pipelines generate noisy initial data, particularly for small or low-resolution regions where language models struggle. While human verification and closed-set detectors effectively mitigated these errors during testing, continuous oversight remains necessary when deploying such models to domain-specific or safety-critical visual environments.
- Paper: Panoptic Segmentation, Alexander Kirillov et al. (2018). This paper defines panoptic segmentation—the unified recognition of amorphous regions and countable objects—that the All-Seeing model extends to open-world, language-guided visual understanding.
- Paper: Visual Genome: Connecting Language and Vision Using Crowdsourced Dense Image Annotations, Ranjay Krishna et al. (2016). Visual Genome establishes the dense region descriptions, attributes, relationships, and visual question-answer pairs that directly anticipate the annotation structure of AS-1B.
- Paper: Segment Anything, Alexander M. Kirillov et al. (2023). Segment Anything provides the promptable segmentation model and iterative human-in-the-loop data engine that inform the All-Seeing project's scalable region annotation pipeline.
- Paper: LVIS: A Dataset for Large Vocabulary Instance Segmentation, Agrim Gupta et al. (2019). LVIS introduces large-vocabulary instance segmentation with explicit attention to rare categories, preparing the reader for All-Seeing's coverage of millions of common and long-tail concepts.
- Paper: PACO: Parts and Attributes of Common Objects, Vignesh Ramanathan et al. (2023). PACO supplies the fine-grained parts-and-attributes perspective that helps explain All-Seeing's emphasis on detailed concept descriptions beyond whole-object labels.
- Paper: VQA: Visual Question Answering, Stanislaw Antol et al. (2015). VQA establishes the visual question-answering task that becomes one of All-Seeing's central region-level supervision signals and zero-shot capabilities.
- Paper: The Open Images Dataset V4, Alina Kuznetsova et al. (2018). Open Images demonstrates how broad, unified annotations across classification, localization, and relationships can support large-scale visual recognition, a foundation expanded by AS-1B.
- Paper: SAM 3: Segment Anything with Concepts, Nicolas Carion et al. (2025). SAM 3 extends the All-Seeing direction from open-world region recognition toward detecting, segmenting, and tracking every instance described by a visual or linguistic concept.
