  While existing large vision-language multimodal models focus on whole image
understanding, there is a prominent gap in achieving region-specific
comprehension. Current approaches that use textual coordinates or spatial
encodings often fail to provide a user-friendly interface for visual prompting.
To address this challenge, we introduce a novel multimodal model capable of
decoding arbitrary visual prompts. This allows users to intuitively mark images
and interact with the model using natural cues like a "red bounding box" or
"pointed arrow". Our simple design directly overlays visual markers onto the
RGB image, eliminating the need for complex region encodings, yet achieves
state-of-the-art performance on region-understanding tasks like Visual7W,
PointQA, and Visual Commonsense Reasoning benchmark. Furthermore, we present
ViP-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark to assess the capability of models in
understanding visual prompts across multiple dimensions, enabling future
research in this domain. Code, data, and model are publicly available.
