Parameter Efficient Fine-tuning via Cross Block Orchestration for Segment Anything Model

Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) is an effective methodology to unleash the potential of large foundation models in novel scenarios with limited training data. In the computer vision community, PEFT has shown effectiveness in image classification, but little research has studied its ability for image segmentation. Fine-tuning segmentation models usually require a heavier adjustment of parameters to align the proper projection directions in the parameter space for new scenarios. This raises a challenge to existing PEFT algorithms, as they often inject a limited number of individual parameters into each block, which prevents substantial adjustment of the projection direction of the parameter space due to the limitation of Hidden Markov Chain along blocks. In this paper, we equip PEFT with a cross-block orchestration mechanism to enable the adaptation of the Segment Anything Model (SAM) to various downstream scenarios. We introduce a novel inter-block communication module, which integrates a learnable relation matrix to facilitate communication among different coefficient sets of each PEFT block's parameter space. Moreover, we propose an intra-block enhancement module, which introduces a linear projection head whose weights are generated from a hyper-complex layer, further enhancing the impact of the adjustment of projection directions on the entire parameter space. Extensive experiments on diverse benchmarks demonstrate that our proposed approach consistently improves the segmentation performance significantly on novel scenarios with only around 1K additional parameters.

SAM-PARSER: Fine-tuning SAM Efficiently by Parameter Space Reconstruction

Segment Anything Model (SAM) has received remarkable attention as it offers a powerful and versatile solution for object segmentation in images. However, fine-tuning SAM for downstream segmentation tasks under different scenarios remains a challenge, as the varied characteristics of different scenarios naturally requires diverse model parameter spaces. Most existing fine-tuning methods attempt to bridge the gaps among different scenarios by introducing a set of new parameters to modify SAM's original parameter space. Unlike these works, in this paper, we propose fine-tuning SAM efficiently by parameter space reconstruction (SAM-PARSER), which introduce nearly zero trainable parameters during fine-tuning. In SAM-PARSER, we assume that SAM's original parameter space is relatively complete, so that its bases are able to reconstruct the parameter space of a new scenario. We obtain the bases by matrix decomposition, and fine-tuning the coefficients to reconstruct the parameter space tailored to the new scenario by an optimal linear combination of the bases. Experimental results show that SAM-PARSER exhibits superior segmentation performance across various scenarios, while reducing the number of trainable parameters by $\approx 290$ times compared with current parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods.

USAGE: A Unified Seed Area Generation Paradigm for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation

Seed area generation is usually the starting point of weakly supervised semantic segmentation (WSSS). Computing the Class Activation Map (CAM) from a multi-label classification network is the de facto paradigm for seed area generation, but CAMs generated from Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Transformers are prone to be under- and over-activated, respectively, which makes the strategies to refine CAMs for CNNs usually inappropriate for Transformers, and vice versa. In this paper, we propose a Unified optimization paradigm for Seed Area GEneration (USAGE) for both types of networks, in which the objective function to be optimized consists of two terms: One is a generation loss, which controls the shape of seed areas by a temperature parameter following a deterministic principle for different types of networks; The other is a regularization loss, which ensures the consistency between the seed areas that are generated by self-adaptive network adjustment from different views, to overturn false activation in seed areas. Experimental results show that USAGE consistently improves seed area generation for both CNNs and Transformers by large margins, e.g., outperforming state-of-the-art methods by a mIoU of 4.1% on PASCAL VOC. Moreover, based on the USAGE-generated seed areas on Transformers, we achieve state-of-the-art WSSS results on both PASCAL VOC and MS COCO.

A Survey on Label-efficient Deep Segmentation: Bridging the Gap between Weak Supervision and Dense Prediction

The rapid development of deep learning has made a great progress in segmentation, one of the fundamental tasks of computer vision. However, the current segmentation algorithms mostly rely on the availability of pixel-level annotations, which are often expensive, tedious, and laborious. To alleviate this burden, the past years have witnessed an increasing attention in building label-efficient, deep-learning-based segmentation algorithms. This paper offers a comprehensive review on label-efficient segmentation methods. To this end, we first develop a taxonomy to organize these methods according to the supervision provided by different types of weak labels (including no supervision, coarse supervision, incomplete supervision and noisy supervision) and supplemented by the types of segmentation problems (including semantic segmentation, instance segmentation and panoptic segmentation). Next, we summarize the existing label-efficient segmentation methods from a unified perspective that discusses an important question: how to bridge the gap between weak supervision and dense prediction -- the current methods are mostly based on heuristic priors, such as cross-pixel similarity, cross-label constraint, cross-view consistency, cross-image relation, etc. Finally, we share our opinions about the future research directions for label-efficient deep segmentation.

Absolute Wrong Makes Better: Boosting Weakly Supervised Object Detection via Negative Deterministic Information

Weakly supervised object detection (WSOD) is a challenging task, in which image-level labels (e.g., categories of the instances in the whole image) are used to train an object detector. Many existing methods follow the standard multiple instance learning (MIL) paradigm and have achieved promising performance. However, the lack of deterministic information leads to part domination and missing instances. To address these issues, this paper focuses on identifying and fully exploiting the deterministic information in WSOD. We discover that negative instances (i.e. absolutely wrong instances), ignored in most of the previous studies, normally contain valuable deterministic information. Based on this observation, we here propose a negative deterministic information (NDI) based method for improving WSOD, namely NDI-WSOD. Specifically, our method consists of two stages: NDI collecting and exploiting. In the collecting stage, we design several processes to identify and distill the NDI from negative instances online. In the exploiting stage, we utilize the extracted NDI to construct a novel negative contrastive learning mechanism and a negative guided instance selection strategy for dealing with the issues of part domination and missing instances, respectively. Experimental results on several public benchmarks including VOC 2007, VOC 2012 and MS COCO show that our method achieves satisfactory performance.

Adaptive Affinity Loss and Erroneous Pseudo-Label Refinement for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation

Semantic segmentation has been continuously investigated in the last ten years, and majority of the established technologies are based on supervised models. In recent years, image-level weakly supervised semantic segmentation (WSSS), including single- and multi-stage process, has attracted large attention due to data labeling efficiency. In this paper, we propose to embed affinity learning of multi-stage approaches in a single-stage model. To be specific, we introduce an adaptive affinity loss to thoroughly learn the local pairwise affinity. As such, a deep neural network is used to deliver comprehensive semantic information in the training phase, whilst improving the performance of the final prediction module. On the other hand, considering the existence of errors in the pseudo labels, we propose a novel label reassign loss to mitigate over-fitting. Extensive experiments are conducted on the PASCAL VOC 2012 dataset to evaluate the effectiveness of our proposed approach that outperforms other standard single-stage methods and achieves comparable performance against several multi-stage methods.