Weakly supervised image segmentation with image-level labels has drawn attention due to the high cost of pixel-level annotations. Traditional methods using Class Activation Maps (CAMs) often highlight only the most discriminative regions, leading to incomplete masks. Recent approaches that introduce textual information struggle with histopathological images due to inter-class homogeneity and intra-class heterogeneity. In this paper, we propose a prototype-based image prompting framework for histopathological image segmentation. It constructs an image bank from the training set using clustering, extracting multiple prototype features per class to capture intra-class heterogeneity. By designing a matching loss between input features and class-specific prototypes using contrastive learning, our method addresses inter-class homogeneity and guides the model to generate more accurate CAMs. Experiments on four datasets (LUAD-HistoSeg, BCSS-WSSS, GCSS, and BCSS) show that our method outperforms existing weakly supervised segmentation approaches, setting new benchmarks in histopathological image segmentation.
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Class-incremental/Continual image segmentation (CIS) aims to train an image segmenter in stages, where the set of available categories differs at each stage. To leverage the built-in objectness of query-based transformers, which mitigates catastrophic forgetting of mask proposals, current methods often decouple mask generation from the continual learning process. This study, however, identifies two key issues with decoupled frameworks: loss of plasticity and heavy reliance on input data order. To address these, we conduct an in-depth investigation of the built-in objectness and find that highly aggregated image features provide a shortcut for queries to generate masks through simple feature alignment. Based on this, we propose SimCIS, a simple yet powerful baseline for CIS. Its core idea is to directly select image features for query assignment, ensuring "perfect alignment" to preserve objectness, while simultaneously allowing queries to select new classes to promote plasticity. To further combat catastrophic forgetting of categories, we introduce cross-stage consistency in selection and an innovative "visual query"-based replay mechanism. Experiments demonstrate that SimCIS consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods across various segmentation tasks, settings, splits, and input data orders. All models and codes will be made publicly available at https://github.com/SooLab/SimCIS.
Generalist vision language models (VLMs) have made significant strides in computer vision, but they fall short in specialized fields like healthcare, where expert knowledge is essential. Current large multimodal models like Gemini and GPT-4o are insufficient for medical tasks due to their reliance on memorized internet knowledge rather than the nuanced expertise required in healthcare. Meanwhile, existing medical VLMs (e.g. Med-Gemini) often lack expert consultation as part of their design, and many rely on outdated, static datasets that were not created with modern, large deep learning models in mind. VLMs are usually trained in three stages: vision pre-training, vision-language pre-training, and instruction fine-tuning (IFT). IFT has been typically applied using a mixture of generic and healthcare data. In contrast, we propose that for medical VLMs, a fourth stage of specialized IFT is necessary, which focuses on medical data and includes information from domain expert models. Domain expert models developed for medical use are crucial because they are specifically trained for certain clinical tasks, e.g. to detect tumors and classify abnormalities through segmentation and classification, which learn fine-grained features of medical data-features that are often too intricate for a VLM to capture effectively. This paper introduces a new framework, VILA-M3, for medical VLMs that utilizes domain knowledge via expert models. We argue that generic VLM architectures alone are not viable for real-world clinical applications and on-demand usage of domain-specialized expert model knowledge is critical for advancing AI in healthcare. Through our experiments, we show an improved state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance with an average improvement of ~9% over the prior SOTA model Med-Gemini and ~6% over models trained on the specific tasks. Our approach emphasizes the importance of domain expertise in creating precise, reliable VLMs for medical applications.
The Impact Label Noise and Choice of Threshold has on Cross-Entropy and Soft-Dice in Image Segmentation
PDF ↗In image segmentation and specifically in medical image segmentation, the soft-Dice loss is often chosen instead of the more traditional cross-entropy loss to improve performance with respect to the Dice metric.Experimental work supporting this claim exists, but how and why the two loss functions lead to different predictions is not well understood.This paper explains the observed discrepancy as a consequence of how those loss functions are effected by label noise and what threshold is used to convert the predicted soft segmentation to predicted labels.In particular, it is shown (i) how the optimal solutions to the two loss functions diverge as the noise is increased, and (ii) how the optimal solutions to soft-Dice can be recovered by thresholding the solutions to cross-entropy with an a priori unknown but efficiently computable threshold.The theoretical results are supported by numerical experiments and it is concluded that cross-entropy with the alternative threshold yields the stability and informative label probability maps associated with cross-entropy without sacrificing the performance of soft-Dice.
OnlineAnySeg: Online Zero-Shot 3D Segmentation by Visual Foundation Model Guided 2D Mask Merging
PDF ↗Online 3D open-vocabulary segmentation of a progressively reconstructed scene is both a critical and challenging task for embodied applications. With the success of visual foundation models (VFMs) in the image domain, leveraging 2D priors to address 3D online segmentation has become a prominent research focus. Since segmentation results provided by 2D priors often require spatial consistency to be lifted into final 3D segmentation, an efficient method for identifying spatial overlap among 2D masks is essential--yet existing methods rarely achieve this in real time, mainly limiting its use to offline approaches. To address this, we propose an efficient method that lifts 2D masks generated by VFMs into a unified 3D instance using a hashing technique. By employing voxel hashing for efficient 3D scene querying, our approach reduces the time complexity of costly spatial overlap queries from O(n^2) to O(n). Accurate spatial associations further enable 3D merging of 2D masks through simple similarity-based filtering in a zero-shot manner, making our approach more robust to incomplete and noisy data. Evaluated on the ScanNet and SceneNN benchmarks, our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance in online, open-vocabulary 3D instance segmentation with leading efficiency.
Environment understanding in egocentric videos is an important step for applications like robotics, augmented reality and assistive technologies. These videos are characterized by dynamic interactions and a strong dependence on the wearer's engagement with the environment. Traditional approaches often focus on isolated clips or fail to integrate rich semantic and geometric information, limiting scene comprehension. We introduce Dynamic Image-Video Feature Fields (DIV-FF), a framework that decomposes the egocentric scene into persistent, dynamic, and actor-based components while integrating both image and video-language features. Our model enables detailed segmentation, captures affordances, understands the surroundings and maintains consistent understanding over time. DIV-FF outperforms state-of-the-art methods, particularly in dynamically evolving scenarios, demonstrating its potential to advance long-term, spatio-temporal scene understanding.
Existing Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation (WSSS) relies on the CNN-based Class Activation Map (CAM) and Transformer-based self-attention map to generate class-specific masks for semantic segmentation. However, CAM and self-attention maps usually cause incomplete segmentation due to classification bias issue. To address this issue, we propose a Multi-Label Prototype Visual Spatial Search (MuP-VSS) method with a spatial query mechanism, which learns a set of learnable class token vectors as queries to search the similarity visual tokens from image patch tokens. Specifically, MuP-VSS consists of two key components: multi-label prototype representation and multi-label prototype optimization. The former designs a global embedding to learn the global tokens from the images, and then proposes a Prototype Embedding Module (PEM) to interact with patch tokens to understand the local semantic information. The latter utilizes the exclusivity and consistency principles of the multi-label prototypes to design three prototype losses to optimize them, which contain cross-class prototype (CCP) contrastive loss, cross-image prototype (CIP) contrastive loss, and patch-to-prototype (P2P) consistency loss. CCP loss models exclusivity of multi-label prototypes learned from a single image to enhance the discriminative properties of each class better. CCP loss learns the consistency of the same class-specific prototypes extracted from multiple images to enhance the semantic consistency. P2P loss is proposed to control the semantic response of the prototype to the image patches. Experimental results on Pascal VOC 2012 and MS COCO show that MuP-VSS significantly outperforms recent methods and achieves state-of-the-art performance.
We propose a novel hybrid Mamba-Transformer backbone, MambaVision, specifically tailored for vision applications. Our core contribution includes redesigning the Mamba formulation to enhance its capability for efficient modeling of visual features. Through a comprehensive ablation study, we demonstrate the feasibility of integrating Vision Transformers (ViT) with Mamba. Our results show that equipping the Mamba architecture with self-attention blocks in the final layers greatly improves its capacity to capture long-range spatial dependencies. Based on these findings, we introduce a family of MambaVision models with a hierarchical architecture to meet various design criteria. For classification on the ImageNet-1K dataset, MambaVision variants achieve state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in terms of both Top-1 accuracy and throughput. In downstream tasks such as object detection, instance segmentation, and semantic segmentation on MS COCO and ADE20K datasets, MambaVision outperforms comparably sized backbones while demonstrating favorable performance. Code: https://github.com/NVlabs/MambaVision
Real-world datasets follow an imbalanced distribution, which poses significant challenges in rare-category object detection. Recent studies tackle this problem by developing re-weighting and re-sampling methods, that utilise the class frequencies of the dataset. However, these techniques focus solely on the frequency statistics and ignore the distribution of the classes in image space, missing important information. In contrast to them, we propose Fractal CALibration (FRACAL): a novel post-calibration method for long-tailed object detection. FRACAL devises a logit adjustment method that utilises the fractal dimension to estimate how uniformly classes are distributed in image space. During inference, it uses the fractal dimension to inversely downweight the probabilities of uniformly spaced class predictions achieving balance in two axes: between frequent and rare categories, and between uniformly spaced and sparsely spaced classes. FRACAL is a post-processing method and it does not require any training, also it can be combined with many off-the-shelf models such as one-stage sigmoid detectors and two-stage instance segmentation models. FRACAL boosts the rare class performance by up to 8.6% and surpasses all previous methods on LVIS dataset, while showing good generalisation to other datasets such as COCO, V3Det and OpenImages. We provide the code in the Appendix.
KMD: Koopman Multi-modality Decomposition for Generalized Brain Tumor Segmentation under Incomplete Modalities
PDF ↗Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), with modalities including T1, T2, T1ce, and Flair, providing complementary information critical for sub-region analysis, is widely used for brain tumor diagnosis. However, clinical practice often suffers from varying degrees of incompleteness of necessary modalities due to reasons such as susceptibility to artifacts. It significantly impairs segmentation model performance. Given the limited available modalities at hand, existing approaches attempt to project them into a shared latent space. However, they ignore decomposing the modality-shared and modality-specific information and failed to construct the relationship among different modalities. Such deficiency limits the effectiveness of the segmentation performance, particularly at the time when the amount of data in each modality is different. In this paper, we propose the plug-and-play Koopman Multi-modality Decomposition (KMD) module, leveraging the Koopman Invariant Subspace to disentangle modality-common and modality-specific information. It is capable of constructing modality relationships that minimize bias toward modalities across various modality-incomplete scenarios. More importantly, it can be integrated into several existing backbones feasibility. Through theoretical deductions and extensive empirical experiences on the BraTS2018 and BraTS2020 datasets, we have sufficiently demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed KMD to promote generalization performance.
Symmetry plays a vital role in understanding structural patterns, aiding object recognition and scene interpretation. This paper focuses on rotation symmetry, where objects remain unchanged when rotated around a central axis, requiring detection of rotation centers and supporting vertices. Traditional methods relied on hand-crafted feature matching, while recent segmentation models based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs) detect rotation centers but struggle with 3D geometric consistency due to viewpoint distortions. To overcome this, we propose a model that directly predicts rotation centers and vertices in 3D space and projects the results back to 2D while preserving structural integrity. By incorporating a vertex reconstruction stage enforcing 3D geometric priors--such as equal side lengths and interior angles--our model enhances robustness and accuracy. Experiments on the DENDI dataset show superior performance in rotation axis detection and validate the impact of 3D priors through ablation studies.
ArticulatedGS: Self-supervised Digital Twin Modeling of Articulated Objects using 3D Gaussian Splatting
PDF ↗We tackle the challenge of concurrent reconstruction at the part level with the RGB appearance and estimation of motion parameters for building digital twins of articulated objects using the 3D Gaussian Splatting (3D-GS) method. With two distinct sets of multi-view imagery, each depicting an object in separate static articulation configurations, we reconstruct the articulated object in 3D Gaussian representations with both appearance and geometry information at the same time. Our approach decoupled multiple highly interdependent parameters through a multi-step optimization process, thereby achieving a stable optimization procedure and high-quality outcomes. We introduce ArticulatedGS, a self-supervised, comprehensive framework that autonomously learns to model shapes and appearances at the part level and synchronizes the optimization of motion parameters, all without reliance on 3D supervision, motion cues, or semantic labels. Our experimental results demonstrate that, among comparable methodologies, our approach has achieved optimal outcomes in terms of part segmentation accuracy, motion estimation accuracy, and visual quality.
The availability of large-scale remote sensing video data underscores the importance of high-quality interactive segmentation. However, challenges such as small object sizes, ambiguous features, and limited generalization make it difficult for current methods to achieve this goal. In this work, we propose ROS-SAM, a method designed to achieve high-quality interactive segmentation while preserving generalization across diverse remote sensing data. The ROS-SAM is built upon three key innovations: 1) LoRA-based fine-tuning, which enables efficient domain adaptation while maintaining SAM's generalization ability, 2) Enhancement of network deep layers to improve the discriminability of extracted features, thereby reducing misclassifications, and 3) Integration of global context with local boundary details in the mask decoder to generate high-quality segmentation masks. Additionally, we redesign the data pipeline to ensure the model learns to better handle objects at varying scales during training while focusing on high-quality predictions during inference. Experiments on remote sensing video datasets show that the data pipeline boosts the IoU by 6%, while ROS-SAM increases the IoU by 13%. Finally, when evaluated on existing remote sensing object tracking datasets, ROS-SAM demonstrates impressive zero-shot capabilities, generating masks that closely resemble manual annotations. These results confirm ROS-SAM as a powerful tool for fine-grained segmentation in remote sensing applications. Code is available at: https://github.com/ShanZard/ROS-SAM.
Existing 3D instance segmentation methods frequently encounter issues with over-segmentation, leading to redundant and inaccurate 3D proposals that complicate downstream tasks. This challenge arises from their unsupervised merging approach, where dense 2D instance masks are lifted across frames into point clouds to form 3D candidate proposals without direct supervision. These candidates are then hierarchically merged based on heuristic criteria, often resulting in numerous redundant segments that fail to combine into precise 3D proposals. To overcome these limitations, we propose a 3D-Aware 2D Mask Tracking module that uses robust 3D priors from a 2D mask segmentation and tracking foundation model (SAM-2) to ensure consistent object masks across video frames. Rather than merging all visible superpoints across views to create a 3D mask, our 3D Mask Optimization module leverages a dynamic programming algorithm to select an optimal set of views, refining the superpoints to produce a final 3D proposal for each object. Our approach achieves comprehensive object coverage within the scene, significantly reduces unnecessary proposals by half, and lowers the average runtime by a factor of 10, mitigating potential negative impacts on downstream applications. Evaluations on ScanNet200 and ScanNet++ confirm the effectiveness of our method, with improvements across Class-Agnostic, Open-Vocabulary, and Open-Ended 3D Instance Segmentation tasks.
SAM-REF: Introducing Image-Prompt Synergy during Interaction for Detail Enhancement in the Segment Anything Model
PDF ↗Interactive segmentation is to segment the mask of the target object according to the user's interactive prompts. There are two mainstream strategies: early fusion and late fusion. Current specialist models utilize the early fusion strategy that encodes the combination of images and prompts to target the prompted objects, yet repetitive complex computations on the images result in high latency. Late fusion models extract image embeddings once and merge them with the prompts in later interactions. This strategy avoids redundant image feature extraction and improves efficiency significantly. A recent milestone is the Segment Anything Model (SAM). However, this strategy limits the models ability to extract detailed information from the prompted target zone. To address this issue, we propose SAM-REF, a two-stage refinement framework that fully integrates images and prompts by using a lightweight refiner into the interaction of late fusion, which combines the accuracy of early fusion and maintains the efficiency of late fusion. Through extensive experiments, we show that our SAM-REF model outperforms the current state-of-the-art method in most metrics on segmentation quality without compromising efficiency.
One of the roadblocks for instance segmentation today is heavy computational overhead and model parameters. Previous methods based on Polar Representation made the initial mark to address this challenge by formulating instance segmentation as polygon detection, but failed to align with mainstream methods in performance. In this paper, we highlight that Representation Errors, arising from the limited capacity of polygons to capture boundary details, have long been overlooked, which results in severe performance degradation. Observing that optimal starting point selection effectively alleviates this issue, we propose an Adaptive Polygonal Sample Decision strategy to dynamically capture the positional variation of representation errors across samples. Additionally, we design a Union-aligned Rasterization Module to incorporate these errors into polygonal assessment, further advancing the proposed strategy. With these components, our framework called PolarNeXt achieves a remarkable performance boost of over 4.8% AP compared to other polar-based methods. PolarNeXt is markedly more lightweight and efficient than state-of-the-art instance segmentation methods, while achieving comparable segmentation accuracy. We expect this work will open up a new direction for instance segmentation in high-resolution images and resource-limited scenarios.
ReasonGrounder: LVLM-Guided Hierarchical Feature Splatting for Open-Vocabulary 3D Visual Grounding and Reasoning
PDF ↗Open-vocabulary 3D visual grounding and reasoning aim to localize objects in a scene based on implicit language descriptions, even when they are occluded. This ability is crucial for tasks such as vision-language navigation and autonomous robotics. However, current methods struggle because they rely heavily on fine-tuning with 3D annotations and mask proposals, which limits their ability to handle diverse semantics and common knowledge required for effective reasoning. To address this, we propose ReasonGrounder, an LVLM-guided framework that uses hierarchical 3D feature Gaussian fields for adaptive grouping based on physical scale, enabling open-vocabulary 3D grounding and reasoning. ReasonGrounder interprets implicit instructions using large vision-language models (LVLM) and localizes occluded objects through 3D Gaussian splatting. By incorporating 2D segmentation masks from the Segment Anything Model (SAM) and multi-view CLIP embeddings, ReasonGrounder selects Gaussian groups based on object scale, enabling accurate localization through both explicit and implicit language understanding, even in novel, occluded views. We also contribute ReasoningGD, a new dataset containing over 10K scenes and 2 million annotations for evaluating open-vocabulary 3D grounding and amodal perception under occlusion. Experiments show that ReasonGrounder significantly improves 3D grounding accuracy in real-world scenarios.
Modeling and reproducing crowd behaviors are important in various domains including psychology, robotics, transport engineering and virtual environments. Conventional methods have focused on synthesizing momentary scenes, which have difficulty in replicating the continuous nature of real-world crowds. In this paper, we introduce a novel method for automatically generating continuous, realistic crowd trajectories with heterogeneous behaviors and interactions among individuals. We first design a crowd emitter model. To do this, we obtain spatial layouts from single input images, including a segmentation map, appearance map, population density map and population probability, prior to crowd generation. The emitter then continually places individuals on the timeline by assigning independent behavior characteristics such as agents' type, pace, and start/end positions using diffusion models. Next, our crowd simulator produces their long-term locomotions. To simulate diverse actions, it can augment their behaviors based on a Markov chain. As a result, our overall framework populates the scenes with heterogeneous crowd behaviors by alternating between the proposed emitter and simulator. Note that all the components in the proposed framework are user-controllable. Lastly, we propose a benchmark protocol to evaluate the realism and quality of the generated crowds in terms of the scene-level population dynamics and the individual-level trajectory accuracy. We demonstrate that our approach effectively models diverse crowd behavior patterns and generalizes well across different geographical environments. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/InhwanBae/CrowdES.
A Semantic Knowledge Complementarity based Decoupling Framework for Semi-supervised Class-imbalanced Medical Image Segmentation
PDF ↗The limited data annotations have made semi-supervised learning (SSL) increasingly popular in medical image analysis. However, the use of pseudo labels in SSL degrades the performance of decoders that heavily rely on high-accuracy annotations. This issue is particularly pronounced in class-imbalanced multi-organ segmentation tasks, where small organs may be under-segmented or even ignored. In this paper, we propose SKCDF, a semantic knowledge complementarity based decoupling framework for multi-organ segmentation in class-imbalanced medical images. SKCDF decouples the data flow based on the responsibilities of the encoder and decoder during model training to make the model effectively learn semantic features, while mitigating the negative impact of unlabeled data on the semantic segmentation task. We also design a semantic knowledge complementarity module that adopts labeled data to guide the generation of pseudo labels and enriches the semantic features of labeled data with unlabeled data, which improves the quality of generated pseudo labels and the robustness of the overall model. Furthermore, we design an auxiliary balanced segmentation head based training strategy to further enhance the segmentation performance of small organs. Experimental results on the Synapse and AMOS datasets show that our method significantly outperforms existing methods.
Self-supervised learning (SSL) on 3D point clouds has the potential to learn feature representations that can transfer to diverse sensors and multiple downstream perception tasks. However, recent SSL approaches fail to define pretext tasks that retain geometric information such as object pose and scale, which can be detrimental to the performance of downstream localization and geometry-sensitive 3D scene understanding tasks, such as 3D semantic segmentation and 3D object detection. We propose PSA-SSL, a novel extension to point cloud SSL that learns object pose and size-aware (PSA) features. Our approach defines a self-supervised bounding box regression pretext task, which retains object pose and size information. Furthermore, we incorporate LiDAR beam pattern augmentation on input point clouds, which encourages learning sensor-agnostic features. Our experiments demonstrate that with a single pretrained model, our light-weight yet effective extensions achieve significant improvements on 3D semantic segmentation with limited labels across popular autonomous driving datasets (Waymo, nuScenes, SemanticKITTI). Moreover, our approach outperforms other state-of-the-art SSL methods on 3D semantic segmentation (using up to 10 times less labels), as well as on 3D object detection. Our code will be released on https://github.com/TRAILab/PSA-SSL.