Interactive Segmentation (IS) segments specific objects or parts by deducing human intent from sparse input prompts. However, the sparse-to-dense mapping is ambiguous, making it challenging for users to obtain segmentations at the desired granularity and causing them to engage in trial-and-error cycles. Although existing multi-granularity IS models (e.g., SAM) alleviate the ambiguity of single-granularity methods by predicting multiple masks simultaneously, this approach has limited scalability and produces redundant results. To address this issue, we introduce a creative granularity-controllable IS paradigm that resolves ambiguity by enabling users to precisely control the segmentation granularity. Specifically, we propose a Unified Granularity Controller (UniGraCo) that supports multi-type optional granularity control signals to pursue unified control over diverse segmentation requirements, effectively overcoming the limitation of single-type control in adapting to different needs, thus boosting the system efficiency and practicality. To mitigate the excessive cost of annotating the multi-granularity masks and the corresponding granularity control signals for training UniGraCo, we construct an automated data engine capable of generating high-quality and granularity-abundant mask-granularity data pairs at low cost. To enable UniGraCo to learn unified granularity controllability in an efficient and stable manner, we further design a granularity-controllable learning strategy. This strategy leverages the generated data pairs to incrementally equip the pre-trained IS model with granularity controllability while preserving its segmentation capability. Extensive experiments on intricate scenarios at both instance and part level demonstrate that our UniGraCo has significant advantages over previous methods, highlighting its potential as a practical interactive tool.

Temporally locating objects with arbitrary class texts is the primary pursuit of open-vocabulary Video Instance Segmentation (VIS). Because of the insufficient vocabulary of video data, previous methods leverage the image-text pretraining model for recognizing object instances by separately aligning each frame with class texts. As a result, the separation breaks the instance movement context of videos and requires a lot of inference overhead. To tackle these issues, we propose BridgeText Alignment (BTA) to link frame-level instance representations as a Brownian Bridge. On one hand, we can calculate the global descriptor of a Brownian bridge for capturing instance dynamics, which enables extra considering temporal information rather than only static information of each frame for aligning with texts. On the other hand, according to the goal-conditioned property of the Brownian bridge, we can estimate the middle frame features via the start and the end frame features so the global feature calculation of a Brownian bridge only needs to infer a few frames, which largely reduces inference overhead. We term our overall pipeline as BriVIS. Following the training settings of previous works, BriVIS surpasses the SOTA (OV2Seg) by a clear margin. For example, on the challenging large-vocabulary datasets (BURST, LVVIS), BriVIS achieves 5.7 and 20.9 mAP, which exhibits +2.2∼+6.7 mAP improvement compared to OV2Seg. Furthermore, after training via BTA, using only the head and the tail frames for alignment improves the speed by 32% (2.77 → 1.88 s/iter) while just decreasing the performance by 0.2 mAP (21.1 → 20.9 mAP).

Unified visual grounding (UVG) capitalizes on a wealth of task-related knowledge across various grounding tasks via one-shot training, which curtails retraining costs and task-specific architecture design efforts. Vertex generation-based UVG methods achieve this versatility by unified modeling object box and contour prediction and provide a text-powered interface to vast related multi-modal tasks, e.g., visual question answering and captioning. However, these methods typically generate vertexes sequentially through autoregression, which is prone to be trapped in error accumulation and heavy computation, especially for high-dimension sequence generation in complex scenarios. In this paper, we develop Parallel Vertex Diffusion (PVD) based on the parallelizability of diffusion models to accurately and efficiently generate vertexes in a parallel and scalable manner. Since the coordinates fluctuate greatly, it typically encounters slow convergence when training diffusion models without geometry constraints. Therefore, we consummate our PVD by two critical components, i.e., center anchor mechanism and angle summation loss, which serve to normalize coordinates and adopt a differentiable geometry descriptor from the point-in-polygon problem of computational geometry to constrain the overall difference of prediction and label vertexes. These innovative designs empower our PVD to demonstrate its superiority with state-of-the-art performance across various grounding tasks.

Interactive Segmentation (IS) segments specific objects or parts in the image according to user input. Current IS pipelines fall into two categories: single-granularity out-put and multi-granularity output. The latter aims to allevi-ate the spatial ambiguity present in the former. However, the multi-granularity output pipeline suffers from limited interaction flexibility and produces redundant results. In this work, we introduce Granularity-Controllable Interactive Segmentation (GraCo), a novel approach that allows precise control of prediction granularity by introducing ad-ditional parameters to input. This enhances the customization of the interactive system and eliminates redundancy while resolving ambiguity. Nevertheless, the exorbitant cost of annotating multi-granularity masks and the lack of avail-able datasets with granularity annotations make it difficult for models to acquire the necessary guidance to control out-put granularity. To address this problem, we design an any-granularity mask generator that exploits the semantic property of the pre-trained IS model to automatically gen-erate abundant mask-granularity pairs without requiring additional manual annotation. Based on these pairs, we propose a granularity-controllable learning strategy that efficiently imparts the granularity controllability to the IS model. Extensive experiments on intricate scenarios at ob-ject and part levels demonstrate that our GraCo has signifi-cant advantages over previous methods. This highlights the potential of GraCo to be a flexible annotation tool, capable of adapting to diverse segmentation scenarios. The project page: https://zhao-yian.github.io/GraCo.

Recently, self-supervised large-scale visual pre-training models have shown great promise in representing pixel-level semantic relationships, significantly promoting the development of unsupervised dense prediction tasks, e.g., unsupervised semantic segmentation (USS). The extracted relationship among pixel-level representations typically contains rich class-aware information that semantically identical pixel embeddings in the representation space gather together to form sophisticated concepts. However, leveraging the learned models to ascertain semantically consistent pixel groups or regions in the image is non-trivial since over/ under-clustering overwhelms the conceptualization procedure under various semantic distributions of different images. In this work, we investigate the pixel-level semantic aggregation in self-supervised ViT pre-trained models as image Segmentation and propose the Adaptive Conceptualization approach for USS, termed ACSeg. Concretely, we explicitly encode concepts into learnable prototypes and design the Adaptive Concept Generator (ACG), which adaptively maps these prototypes to informative concepts for each image. Meanwhile, considering the scene complexity of different images, we propose the modularity loss to optimize ACG independent of the concept number based on estimating the intensity of pixel pairs belonging to the same concept. Finally, we turn the USS task into classifying the discovered concepts in an unsupervised manner. Extensive experiments with state-of-the-art results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed ACSeg.

Weakly supervised semantic segmentation is typically inspired by class activation maps, which serve as pseudo masks with class-discriminative regions highlighted. Although tremendous efforts have been made to recall precise and complete locations for each class, existing methods still commonly suffer from the unsolicited Out-of-Candidate (OC) error predictions that do not belong to the label candidates, which could be avoidable since the contradiction with image-level class tags is easy to be detected. In this paper, we develop a group ranking-based Out-of-f;Candidate Rectification (OCR) mechanism in a plug-and-play fashion. Firstly, we adaptively split the semantic categories into In-Candidate (IC) and OC groups for each OC pixel according to their prior annotation correlation and posterior prediction correlation. Then, we derive a differentiable rectification loss to force OC pixels to shift to the IC group. Incorporating OCR with seminal baselines (e.g., AffinityNet, SEAM, MCTformer), we can achieve remarkable performance gains on both Pascal VOC (+3.2%, +3.3%, +0.8% mIoU) and MS COCO (+1.0%, +1.3%, +0.5% mIoU) datasets with negligible extra training overhead, which jus-tifies the effectiveness and generality of OCR.††Ŋ github.com/sennnnn/Out-of-Candidate-Rectification

Existing text-video retrieval solutions are, in essence, discriminant models focused on maximizing the conditional likelihood, i.e., p(candidates|query). While straightforward, this de facto paradigm overlooks the underlying data distribution p(query), which makes it challenging to identify out-of-distribution data. To address this limitation, we creatively tackle this task from a generative viewpoint and model the correlation between the text and the video as their joint probability p(candidates,query). This is accomplished through a diffusion-based text-video retrieval framework (Diffusion-Ret), which models the retrieval task as a process of gradually generating joint distribution from noise. During training, DiffusionRet is optimized from both the generation and discrimination perspectives, with the generator being optimized by generation loss and the feature extractor trained with contrastive loss. In this way, DiffusionRet cleverly leverages the strengths of both generative and discriminative methods. Extensive experiments on five commonly used text-video retrieval benchmarks, including MSRVTT, LSMDC, MSVD, ActivityNet Captions, and DiDeMo, with superior performances, justify the efficacy of our method. More encouragingly, without any modification, DiffusionRet even performs well in out-domain retrieval settings. We believe this work brings fundamental insights into the related fields. Code is available at https://github.com/jpthu17/DiffusionRet.

Interactive segmentation enables users to segment as needed by providing cues of objects, which introduces human-computer interaction for many fields, such as image editing and medical image analysis. Typically, massive and expansive pixel-level annotations are spent to train deep models by object-oriented interactions with manually labeled object masks. In this work, we reveal that informative interactions can be made by simulation with semantic-consistent yet diverse region exploration in an unsupervised paradigm. Concretely, we introduce a Multi-granularity Interaction Simulation (MIS) approach to open up a promising direction for unsupervised interactive segmentation. Drawing on the high-quality dense features produced by recent self-supervised models, we propose to gradually merge patches or regions with similar features to form more extensive regions and thus, every merged region serves as a semantic-meaningful multi-granularity proposal. By randomly sampling these proposals and simulating possible interactions based on them, we provide meaningful interaction at multiple granularities to teach the model to understand interactions. Our MIS significantly outperforms non-deep learning unsupervised methods and is even comparable with some previous deep-supervised methods without any annotation.

Position information is critical for Vision Transformers (VTs) due to the permutation-invariance of self-attention operations. A typical way to introduce position information is adding the absolute Position Embedding (PE) to patch embedding before entering VTs. However, this approach operates the same Layer Normalization (LN) to token embedding and PE, and delivers the same PE to each layer. This results in restricted and monotonic PE across layers, as the shared LN affine parameters are not dedicated to PE, and the PE cannot be adjusted on a per-layer basis. To overcome these limitations, we propose using two independent LNs for token embeddings and PE in each layer, and progressively delivering PE across layers. By implementing this approach, VTs will receive layer-adaptive and hierarchical PE. We name our method as Layer-adaptive Position Embedding, abbreviated as LaPE, which is simple, effective, and robust. Extensive experiments on image classification, object detection, and semantic segmentation demonstrate that LaPE significantly outperforms the default PE method. For example, LaPE improves +1.06% for CCT on CIFAR100, +1.57% for DeiT-Ti on ImageNet-1K, +0.7 box AP and +0.5 mask AP for ViT-Adapter-Ti on COCO, and +1.37 mIoU for tiny Segmenter on ADE20K. This is remarkable considering LaPE only increases negligible parameters, memory, and computational cost.

The top-down and bottom-up methods are two mainstreams of referring segmentation, while both methods have their own intrinsic weaknesses. Top-down methods are chiefly disturbed by Polar Negative (PN) errors owing to the lack of fine-grained cross-modal alignment. Bottom-up methods are mainly perturbed by Inferior Positive (IP) errors due to the lack of prior object information. Nevertheless, we discover that two types of methods are highly complementary for restraining respective weaknesses but the direct average combination leads to harmful interference. In this context, we build Win-win Cooperation (WiCo) to exploit complementary nature of two types of methods on both interaction and integration aspects for achieving a win-win improvement. For the interaction aspect, Complementary Feature Interaction (CFI) introduces prior object information to bottom-up branch and provides fine-grained information to top-down branch for complementary feature enhancement. For the integration aspect, Gaussian Scoring Integration (GSI) models the gaussian performance distributions of two branches and weighted integrates results by sampling confident scores from the distributions. With our WiCo, several prominent bottom-up and top-down combinations achieve remarkable improvements on three common datasets with reasonable extra costs, which justifies effectiveness and generality of our method.