ColLab: A Collaborative Spatial Progressive Data Engine for Referring Expression Comprehension and Generation

Abstract

Referring Expression Comprehension (REC) and Referring Expression Generation (REG) are fundamental tasks in multimodal understanding, supporting precise object localization through natural language. However, existing REC and REG datasets rely heavily on manual annotation, which is labor-intensive and difficult to scale. In this paper, we propose ColLab, a collaborative spatial progressive data engine that enables fully automated REC and REG data generation without human supervision. Specifically, our method introduces a Collaborative Multimodal Model Interaction (CMMI) strategy, which leverages the semantic understanding of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) and large language models (LLMs) to generate descriptions. Furthermore, we design a module termed Spatial Progressive Augmentation (SPA) to enhance spatial expressiveness among duplicate instances. Experiments demonstrate that ColLab significantly accelerates the annotation process of REC and REG while improving the quality and discriminability of the generated expressions. In addition to the core methodological contribution, our framework was partially adopted in the data generation pipeline of the ICCV 2025 MARS2 Challenge on Multimodal Reasoning, enriching the dataset with diverse and challenging samples that better reflect real-world reasoning demands.