The Segment Anything Model (SAM) has demonstrated remarkable capability as a general segmentation model given visual prompts such as points or boxes. While SAM is conceptually compatible with text prompts, it merely employs linguistic features from vision-language models as prompt embeddings and lacks fine-grained cross-modal interaction. This deficiency limits its application in referring image segmentation (RIS), where the targets are specified by free-form natural language expressions. In this paper, we introduce ReferSAM, a novel SAM-based framework that enhances cross-modal interaction and reformulates prompt encoding, thereby unleashing SAM’s segmentation capability for RIS. Specifically, ReferSAM incorporates the Vision-Language Interactor (VLI) to integrate linguistic features with visual features during the image encoding stage of SAM. This interactor introduces fine-grained alignment between linguistic features and multi-scale visual representations without altering the architecture of pre-trained models. Additionally, we present the Vision-Language Prompter (VLP) to generate dense and sparse prompt embeddings by aggregating the aligned linguistic and visual features. Consequently, the generated embeddings sufficiently prompt SAM’s mask decoder to provide precise segmentation results. Extensive experiments on five public benchmarks demonstrate that ReferSAM achieves state-of-the-art performance on both classic and generalized RIS tasks. The code and models are available at https://github.com/lsa1997/ReferSAM.

Video Moment Retrieval (VMR) aims to retrieve temporal segments in untrimmed videos corresponding to a given language query by constructing cross-modal alignment strategies. However, these existing strategies are often sub-optimal since they ignore the modality imbalance problem, i.e., the semantic richness inherent in videos far exceeds that of a given limited-length sentence. Therefore, in pursuit of better alignment, a natural idea is enhancing the video modality to filter out query-irrelevant semantics, and enhancing the text modality to capture more segment-relevant knowledge. In this paper, we introduce Modal-Enhanced Semantic Modeling (MESM), a novel framework for more balanced alignment through enhancing features at two levels. First, we enhance the video modality at the frame-word level through word reconstruction. This strategy emphasizes the portions associated with query words in frame-level features while suppressing irrelevant parts. Therefore, the enhanced video contains less redundant semantics and is more balanced with the textual modality. Second, we enhance the textual modality at the segment-sentence level by learning complementary knowledge from context sentences and ground-truth segments. With the knowledge added to the query, the textual modality thus maintains more meaningful semantics and is more balanced with the video modality. By implementing two levels of MESM, the semantic information from both modalities is more balanced to align, thereby bridging the modality gap. Experiments on three widely used benchmarks, including the out-of-distribution settings, show that the proposed framework achieves a new start-of-the-art performance with notable generalization ability (e.g., 4.42% and 7.69% average gains of [email protected] on Charades-STA and Charades-CG). The code will be available at https://github.com/lntzm/MESM.

Generalized few-shot semantic segmentation (GFSS) distinguishes pixels of base and novel classes from the background simultaneously, conditioning on sufficient data of base classes and a few examples from novel class. A typical GFSS approach has two training phases: base class learning and novel class updating. Nevertheless, such a stand-alone updating process often compromises the well-learnt features and results in performance drop on base classes. In this paper, we propose a new idea of leveraging Projection onto Orthogonal Prototypes (POP), which updates features to identify novel classes without compromising base classes. POP builds a set of orthogonal prototypes, each of which represents a semantic class, and makes the prediction for each class separately based on the features projected onto its prototype. Technically, POP first learns prototypes on base data, and then extends the prototype set to novel classes. The orthogonal constraint of POP encourages the orthogonality between the learnt prototypes and thus mitigates the influence on base class features when generalizing to novel prototypes. Moreover, we capitalize on the residual of feature projection as the background representation to dynamically fit semantic shifting (i.e., background no longer includes the pixels of novel classes in updating phase). Extensive experiments on two benchmarks demonstrate that our POP achieves superior performances on novel classes without sacrificing much accuracy on base classes. Notably, POP outperforms the state-of-the-art fine-tuning by 3.93% overall mIoU on PASCAL-5iin 5-shot scenario.

Referring image segmentation aims to segment the target object described by a natural-language utterance. Recent approaches typically distinguish pixels by aligning pixel-wise visual features with linguistic features extracted from the referring description. Nevertheless, such a free-form description only specifies certain discriminative attributes of the target object or its relations to a limited number of objects, which fails to represent the rich visual context adequately. The stand-alone linguistic features are therefore unable to align with all visual concepts, resulting in inaccurate segmentation. In this paper, we propose to address this issue by incorporating rich visual context into linguistic features for sufficient vision-language alignment. Specifically, we present Context-Aware Referring Image Segmentation (CARIS), a novel architecture that enhances the contextual awareness of linguistic features via sequential vision-language attention and learnable prompts. Technically, CARIS develops a context-aware mask decoder with sequential bidirectional cross-modal attention to integrate the linguistic features with visual context, which are then aligned with pixel-wise visual features. Furthermore, two groups of learnable prompts are employed to delve into additional contextual information from the input image and facilitate the alignment with non-target pixels, respectively. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CARIS achieves new state-of-the-art performances on three public benchmarks. Code is available at https://github.com/lsa1997/CARIS.

Current attention-based methods for semantic segmentation mainly model pixel relation through pairwise affinity and coarse segmentation. For the first time, this paper explores modeling pixel relation via Class Activation Map (CAM). Beyond the previous CAM generated from image-level classification, we present Partial CAM, which sub-divides the task into region-level prediction and achieves better localization performance. In order to eliminate the intra-class inconsistency caused by the variances of local context, we further propose Partial Class Activation Attention (PCAA) that simultaneously utilizes local and global class-level representations for attention calculation. Once obtained the partial CAM, PCAA collects local class centers and computes pixel-to-class relation locally. Applying local-specific representations ensures reliable results under different local contexts. To guarantee global consistency, we gather global representations from all local class centers and conduct feature aggregation. Experimental results confirm that Partial CAM outperforms the previous two strategies as pixel relation. Notably, our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on several challenging benchmarks including Cityscapes, Pascal Context, and ADE20K. Code is available at https://github.com/lsa1997/PCAA.

Previous image-level weakly-supervised semantic segmentation methods based on Class Activation Map (CAM) have two limitations: 1) focusing on partial discriminative foreground regions and 2) containing undesirable background. The above issues are attributed to the spurious correlations between the object and background (semantic ambiguity) and the insufficient spatial perception ability of the classification network (spatial ambiguity). In this work, we propose a novel self-supervised framework to mitigate the semantic and spatial ambiguity from the perspectives of background bias and object perception. First, a background decoupling mechanism (BDM) is proposed to handle the semantic ambiguity by regularizing the consistency of predicted CAMs from the samples with identical foregrounds but different backgrounds. Thus, a decoupled relationship is constructed to reduce the dependence between the object instance and the scene information. Second, a global object-aware pooling (GOP) is introduced to alleviate spatial ambiguity. The GOP utilizes a learnable object-aware map to dynamically aggregate spatial information and further improve the performance of CAMs. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method by achieving new state-of-the-art results on both the Pascal VOC 2012 and MS COCO 2014 datasets.

Significant progress has been made in semantic segmentation by deep neural networks, most of which concentrate on discriminative representation learning. However, model performances suffer from deterioration when the training process is optimized without awareness of data imperfections (e.g., data imbalance and label noise). In contrast to previous works, we present a novel model-agnostic training optimization algorithm which has two prominent components: Domain Division and Domain Generalization. Rather than sampling all pixels uniformly, an uncertainty-based Domain Division method is proposed to deal with data imbalance, which dynamically decomposes the pixels into meta-train and meta-test domains according to whether they lie near the classification boundary. The meta-train domain corresponds to highly-uncertain but more informative pixels and determines the current main update direction. Furthermore, to alleviate the degradation caused by label noise, we propose a Domain Generalization technique with a meta-optimization objective which ensures that update on the meta-train domain should generalize to the meta-test domain. Comprehensive experimental results on three public benchmarks across multi-modalities show that the proposed optimization algorithm is superior to other segmentation optimization methods and significantly outperforms conventional methods without introducing additional model parameters.