GrabVG: Graph-Attentive Binding for Visual Grounding in UAV Imagery

Abstract

Visual grounding in Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) imagery aims to localize a target object in complex bird's-eye-view scenes according to a natural language description. However, the abundance of small, densely distributed, and visually similar objects creates high visual redundancy, while repetitive local configurations give rise to strong topological ambiguity. Existing approaches mainly focus on visual--language feature alignment or dense contextual interaction, yet they struggle to distinguish subtle inter-instance differences and effectively exploit spatial topological structures, leading to inaccurate grounding in highly crowded scenarios. To address these challenges, we propose $\textbf{GrabVG}$, a novel visual grounding framework inspired by human visual search. GrabVG explicitly decomposes grounding into two sequential stages: $\textit{preattentive hypothesis search}$ and $\textit{graph-attentive feature binding}$. Specifically, we first generate a compact set of reliable object hypotheses through distillation-guided proposal induction and text-aware hypothesis filtering, substantially reducing background distractions and semantic mismatches. These hypotheses are then organized into a sparse graph, where language-guided intra-instance visual cues and inter-instance topological relationships are jointly bound and propagated via graph attention, enabling efficient spatial reasoning and accurate target localization. Extensive experiments on AerialVG and AerialSense show that GrabVG achieves a favorable accuracy--speed trade-off, reaching 67.31$\%$ and 80.34$\%$ Acc@0.5 and outperforming the corresponding baselines by 10.55 and 8.76 percentage points, respectively.