In recent years, semantic segmentation has flourished in various applications. However, the high computational cost remains a significant challenge that hinders its further adoption. The filter pruning method for structured network slimming offers a direct and effective solution for the reduction of segmentation networks. Nevertheless, we argue that most existing pruning methods, originally designed for image classification, overlook the fact that segmentation is a location-sensitive task, which consequently leads to their suboptimal performance when applied to segmentation networks. To address this issue, this paper proposes a novel approach, denoted as Spatial-aware Information Redundancy Filter Pruning (SIRFP), which aims to reduce feature redundancy between channels. First, we formulate the pruning process as a maximum edge weight clique problem (MEWCP) in graph theory, thereby minimizing the redundancy among the remaining features after pruning. Within this framework, we introduce a spatial-aware redundancy metric based on feature maps, thus endowing the pruning process with location sensitivity to better adapt to pruning segmentation networks. Additionally, based on the MEWCP, we propose a low computational complexity greedy strategy to solve this NP-hard problem, making it feasible and efficient for structured pruning. To validate the effectiveness of our method, we conducted extensive comparative experiments on various challenging datasets. The results demonstrate the superior performance of SIRFP for semantic segmentation tasks.

Class incremental semantic segmentation (CISS) aims to segment new classes during continual steps while preventing the forgetting of old knowledge. Existing methods alleviate catastrophic forgetting by replaying distributions of previously learned classes using stored prototypes or features. However, they overlook a critical issue: in CISS, the representation of class knowledge is updated continuously through incremental learning, whereas prototype replay methods maintain fixed prototypes. This mismatch between updated representation and fixed prototypes limits the effectiveness of the prototype replay strategy. To address this issue, we propose the Adaptive prototype replay (Adapter) for CISS in this paper. Adapter comprises an adaptive deviation compensation (ADC) strategy and an uncertainty-aware constraint (UAC) loss. Specifically, the ADC strategy dynamically updates the stored prototypes based on the estimated representation shift distance to match the updated representation of old class. The UAC loss reduces prediction uncertainty, aggregating discriminative features to aid in generating compact prototypes. Additionally, we introduce a compensation-based prototype similarity discriminative (CPD) loss to ensure adequate differentiation between similar prototypes, thereby enhancing the efficiency of the adaptive prototype replay strategy. Extensive experiments on Pascal VOC and ADE20K datasets demonstrate that Adapter achieves state-of-the-art results and proves effective across various CISS tasks, particularly in challenging multi-step scenarios.

The ever-growing size of training datasets enhances the generalization capability of modern machine learning models but also incurs exorbitant computational costs. Existing data pruning approaches aim to accelerate training by removing those less important samples. However, they often rely on gradients or proxy models, leading to prohibitive additional costs of gradient back-propagation and proxy model training. In this paper, we propose Partial Forward Blocking (PFB), a novel framework for lossless training acceleration. The efficiency of PFB stems from its unique adaptive pruning pipeline: sample importance is assessed based on features extracted from the shallow layers of the target model. Less important samples are then pruned, allowing only the retained ones to proceed with the subsequent forward pass and loss back-propagation. This mechanism significantly reduces the computational overhead of deep-layer forward passes and back-propagation for pruned samples, while also eliminating the need for auxiliary backward computations and proxy model training. Moreover, PFB introduces probability density as an indicator of sample importance. Combined with an adaptive distribution estimation module, our method dynamically prioritizes relatively rare samples, aligning with the constantly evolving training state. Extensive experiments demonstrate the significant superiority of PFB in performance and speed. On ImageNet, PFB achieves a 0.5% accuracy improvement and 33% training time reduction with 40% data pruned.

In real-word scenarios, person re-identification (ReID) expects to identify a person-of-interest via the descriptive query, regardless of whether the query is a single modality or a combination of multiple modalities. However, existing methods and datasets remain constrained to limited modalities, failing to meet this requirement. Therefore, we investigate a new challenging problem called Omni Multi-modal Person Re-identification (OM-ReID), which aims to achieve effective retrieval with varying multi-modal queries. To address dataset scarcity, we construct ORBench, the first high-quality multi-modal dataset comprising 1,000 unique identities across five modalities: RGB, infrared, color pencil, sketch, and textual description. This dataset also has significant superiority in terms of diversity, such as the painting perspectives and textual information. It could serve as an ideal platform for follow-up investigations in OM-ReID. Moreover, we propose ReID5o, a novel multi-modal learning framework for person ReID. It enables synergistic fusion and cross-modal alignment of arbitrary modality combinations in a single model, with a unified encoding and multi-expert routing mechanism proposed. Extensive experiments verify the advancement and practicality of our ORBench. A range of models have been compared on it, and our proposed ReID5o gives the best performance.

Recent real-time semantic segmentation methods usually adopt an additional semantic branch to pursue rich long-range context. However, the additional branch incurs undesirable computational overhead and slows inference speed. To eliminate this dilemma, we propose SCTNet, a single branch CNN with transformer semantic information for real-time segmentation. SCTNet enjoys the rich semantic representations of an inference-free semantic branch while retaining the high efficiency of lightweight single branch CNN. SCTNet utilizes a transformer as the training-only semantic branch considering its superb ability to extract long-range context. With the help of the proposed transformer-like CNN block CFBlock and the semantic information alignment module, SCTNet could capture the rich semantic information from the transformer branch in training. During the inference, only the single branch CNN needs to be deployed. We conduct extensive experiments on Cityscapes, ADE20K, and COCO-Stuff-10K, and the results show that our method achieves the new state-of-the-art performance. The code and model is available at https://github.com/xzz777/SCTNet.

Open-vocabulary semantic segmentation is a challenging task, which requires the model to output semantic masks of an image beyond a close-set vocabulary. Although many efforts have been made to utilize powerful CLIP models to accomplish this task, they are still easily overfitting to training classes due to the natural gaps in semantic information between training and new classes. To overcome this challenge, we propose a novel framework for open-vocabulary semantic segmentation called EBSeg, incorpo-rating an Adaptively Balanced Decoder (AdaB Decoder) and a Semantic Structure Consistency loss (SSC Loss). The AdaB Decoder is designed to generate different image embeddings for both training and new classes. Subsequently, these two types of embeddings are adaptively balanced to fully exploit their ability to recognize training classes and generalization ability for new classes. To learn a consistent semantic structure from CLIP, the SSC Loss aligns the inter-classes affinity in the image feature space with that in the text feature space of CLIP, thereby improving the generalization ability of our model. Furthermore, we employ a frozen SAM image encoder to complement the spatial information that CLIP features lack due to the low training image resolution and image-level supervision inherent in CLIP. Extensive experiments conducted across various benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed EBSeg outperforms the state-of-the-art methods. Our code and trained models will be here: https://github.com/slonetime/EBSeg.

Improving boundary segmentation results has recently attracted increasing attention in the field of semantic segmentation. Since existing popular methods usually exploit the long-range context, the boundary cues are obscure in the feature space, leading to poor boundary results. In this paper, we propose a novel conditional boundary loss (CBL) for semantic segmentation to improve the performance of the boundaries. The CBL creates a unique optimization goal for each boundary pixel, conditioned on its surrounding neighbors. The conditional optimization of the CBL is easy yet effective. In contrast, most previous boundary-aware methods have difficult optimization goals or may cause potential conflicts with the semantic segmentation task. Specifically, the CBL enhances the intra-class consistency and inter-class difference, by pulling each boundary pixel closer to its unique local class center and pushing it away from its different-class neighbors. Moreover, the CBL filters out noisy and incorrect information to obtain precise boundaries, since only surrounding neighbors that are correctly classified participate in the loss calculation. Our loss is a plug-and-play solution that can be used to improve the boundary segmentation performance of any semantic segmentation network. We conduct extensive experiments on ADE20K, Cityscapes, and Pascal Context, and the results show that applying the CBL to various popular segmentation networks can significantly improve the mIoU and boundary F-score performance.