Multi-label classification is crucial for comprehensive image understanding, yet acquiring accurate annotations is challenging and costly. To address this, a recent study suggests exploiting unsupervised multi-label classification leveraging CLIP, a powerful vision-language model. Despite CLIP’s proficiency, it suffers from view-dependent predictions and inherent bias, limiting its effectiveness. We propose a novel method that addresses these issues by leveraging multiple views near target objects, guided by Class Activation Mapping (CAM) of the classifier, and debiasing pseudo-labels derived from CLIP predictions. Our Classifier-guided CLIP Distillation (CCD) enables selecting multiple local views without extra labels and debiasing predictions to enhance classification performance. Experimental results validate our method’s superiority over existing techniques across diverse datasets. The code is available at https://github.com/k0u-id/CCD.

State-of-the-art techniques in weakly-supervised semantic segmentation (WSSS) using image-level labels exhibit severe performance degradation on driving scene datasets such as Cityscapes. To address this challenge, we develop a new WSSS framework tailored to driving scene datasets. Based on extensive analysis of dataset characteristics, we employ Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) as our baseline to obtain pseudo-masks. However, CLIP introduces two key challenges: (1) pseudo-masks from CLIP lack in representing small object classes, and (2) these masks contain notable noise. We propose solutions for each issue as follows. (1) We devise Global-Local View Training that seamlessly incorporates small-scale patches during model training, thereby enhancing the model's capability to handle small-sized yet critical objects in driving scenes (e.g., traffic light). (2) We introduce Consistency-Aware Region Balancing (CARB), a novel technique that discerns reliable and noisy regions through evaluating the consistency between CLIP masks and segmentation predictions. It prioritizes reliable pixels over noisy pixels via adaptive loss weighting. Notably, the proposed method achieves 51.8\% mIoU on the Cityscapes test dataset, showcasing its potential as a strong WSSS baseline on driving scene datasets. Experimental results on CamVid and WildDash2 demonstrate the effectiveness of our method across diverse datasets, even with small-scale datasets or visually challenging conditions. The code is available at https://github.com/k0u-id/CARB.

Weakly-supervised semantic segmentation (WSSS) has recently gained much attention for its promise to train segmentation models only with image-level labels. Existing WSSS methods commonly argue that the sparse coverage of CAM incurs the performance bottleneck of WSSS. This paper provides analytical and empirical evidence that the actual bottleneck may not be sparse coverage but a global thresholding scheme applied after CAM. Then, we show that this issue can be mitigated by satisfying two conditions; 1) reducing the imbalance in the foreground activation and 2) increasing the gap between the foreground and the background activation. Based on these findings, we propose a novel activation manipulation network with a per-pixel classification loss and a label conditioning module. Per-pixel classification naturally induces two-level activation in activation maps, which can penalize the most discriminative parts, promote the less discriminative parts, and deactivate the background regions. Label conditioning imposes that the output label of pseudo-masks should be any of true image-level labels; it penalizes the wrong activation assigned to non-target classes. Based on extensive analysis and evaluations, we demonstrate that each component helps produce accurate pseudo-masks, achieving the robustness against the choice of the global threshold. Finally, our model achieves state-of-the-art records on both PAS-CAL VOC 2012 and MS COCO 2014 datasets. The code is available at https://github.com/gaviotas/AMN.