The goal of this work is to adapt Segment Anything Models (SAM) into crack segmentation tasks via automatic label generation, thus eliminating manual annotation cost. In this regard, an intuitive approach is to extract edges of crack samples and generate labels via the dilation and erosion processes for fine-tuning SAM. However, this simple solution cannot guarantee the quality of generated labels, as crack regions will be corrupted due to the imperfect edge detection. To this end, this paper proposes CoGenSAM, a novel Codebook-interactive Generative Labeling framework that enables an annotation-free SAM fine-tuning. To achieve this, in the first stage, we pre-train a vector-quantized variational auto-encoder (VQVAE) by reconstructing the synthesized crack-like structures for learning crack-aware priors within the codebook. In the second stage, these priors help another VQVAE serve as the restoration model to restore the randomly corrupted structures into uncorrupted ones. Specifically, we propose the crack-aware contrastive-interaction to maximize the mutual information with the above priors via codebook interaction. Then, high-quality labels can be generated by restoring corrupted labels from edge detection, contributing to an annotation-free SAM fine-tuning. We collect a new dataset, Bridge2025, to address the limited availability of related bridge-oriented benchmarks. Experiments show that our performance is close to fully-supervised methods.

Large kernels make standard convolutional neural networks (CNNs) great again over transformer architectures in various vision tasks. Nonetheless, recent studies meticulously designed around increasing kernel size have shown diminishing returns or stagnation in performance. Thus, the hidden factors of large kernel convolution that affect model performance remain unexplored. In this paper, we reveal that the key hidden factors of large kernels can be summarized as two separate components: extracting features at a certain granularity and fusing features by multiple pathways. To this end, we leverage the multi-path long-distance sparse dependency relationship to enhance feature utilization via the proposed Shiftwise (SW) convolution operator with a pure CNN architecture. In a wide range of vision tasks such as classification, segmentation, and detection, SW surpasses state-of-the-art transformers and CNN architectures, including SLaK and UniRepLKNet. More importantly, our experiments demonstrate that 3×3 convolutions can replace large convolutions in existing large kernel CNNs to achieve comparable effects, which may inspire follow-up works. Code and all the models at https://github.com/lidc54/shift-wiseConv.