Few-shot image segmentation is the process of segmenting images with limited labeled data.
The Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM2) has demonstrated remarkable promptable visual segmentation capabilities in video data, showing potential for extension to medical image segmentation (MIS) tasks involving 3D volumes and temporally correlated 2D image sequences. However, adapting SAM2 to MIS presents several challenges, including the need for extensive annotated medical data for fine-tuning and high-quality manual prompts, which are both labor-intensive and require intervention from medical experts. To address these challenges, we introduce OFL-SAM2, a prompt-free SAM2 framework for label-efficient MIS. Our core idea is to leverage limited annotated samples to train a lightweight mapping network that captures medical knowledge and transforms generic image features into target features, thereby providing additional discriminative target representations for each frame and eliminating the need for manual prompts. Crucially, the mapping network supports online parameter update during inference, enhancing the model's generalization across test sequences. Technically, we introduce two key components: (1) an online few-shot learner that trains the mapping network to generate target features using limited data, and (2) an adaptive fusion module that dynamically integrates the target features with the memory-attention features generated by frozen SAM2, leading to accurate and robust target representation. Extensive experiments on three diverse MIS datasets demonstrate that OFL-SAM2 achieves state-of-the-art performance with limited training data.
Cross-domain few-shot medical image segmentation (CD-FSMIS) offers a promising and data-efficient solution for medical applications where annotations are severely scarce and multimodal analysis is required. However, existing methods typically filter out domain-specific information to improve generalization, which inadvertently limits cross-domain performance and degrades source-domain accuracy. To address this, we present Contrastive Graph Modeling (C-Graph), a framework that leverages the structural consistency of medical images as a reliable domain-transferable prior. We represent image features as graphs, with pixels as nodes and semantic affinities as edges. A Structural Prior Graph (SPG) layer is proposed to capture and transfer target-category node dependencies and enable global structure modeling through explicit node interactions. Building upon SPG layers, we introduce a Subgraph Matching Decoding (SMD) mechanism that exploits semantic relations among nodes to guide prediction. Furthermore, we design a Confusion-minimizing Node Contrast (CNC) loss to mitigate node ambiguity and subgraph heterogeneity by contrastively enhancing node discriminability in the graph space. Our method significantly outperforms prior CD-FSMIS approaches across multiple cross-domain benchmarks, achieving state-of-the-art performance while simultaneously preserving strong segmentation accuracy on the source domain.
Sophisticated text-centric forgeries, fueled by rapid AIGC advancements, pose a significant threat to societal security and information authenticity. Current methods for text-centric forgery analysis are often limited to coarse-grained visual analysis and lack the capacity for sophisticated reasoning. Moreover, they typically treat detection, grounding, and explanation as discrete sub-tasks, overlooking their intrinsic relationships for holistic performance enhancement. To address these challenges, we introduce LogicLens, a unified framework for Visual-Textual Co-reasoning that reformulates these objectives into a joint task. The deep reasoning of LogicLens is powered by our novel Cross-Cues-aware Chain of Thought (CCT) mechanism, which iteratively cross-validates visual cues against textual logic. To ensure robust alignment across all tasks, we further propose a weighted multi-task reward function for GRPO-based optimization. Complementing this framework, we first designed the PR$^2$ (Perceiver, Reasoner, Reviewer) pipeline, a hierarchical and iterative multi-agent system that generates high-quality, cognitively-aligned annotations. Then, we constructed RealText, a diverse dataset comprising 5,397 images with fine-grained annotations, including textual explanations, pixel-level segmentation, and authenticity labels for model training. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of LogicLens across multiple benchmarks. In a zero-shot evaluation on T-IC13, it surpasses the specialized framework by 41.4% and GPT-4o by 23.4% in macro-average F1 score. Moreover, on the challenging dense-text T-SROIE dataset, it establishes a significant lead over other MLLM-based methods in mF1, CSS, and the macro-average F1. Our dataset, model, and code will be made publicly available.
This paper presents an approach developed to address the PlantClef 2025 challenge, which consists of a fine-grained multi-label species identification, over high-resolution images. Our solution focused on employing class prototypes obtained from the training dataset as a proxy guidance for training a segmentation Vision Transformer (ViT) on the test set images. To obtain these representations, the proposed method extracts features from training dataset images and create clusters, by applying K-Means, with $K$ equals to the number of classes in the dataset. The segmentation model is a customized narrow ViT, built by replacing the patch embedding layer with a frozen DinoV2, pre-trained on the training dataset for individual species classification. This model is trained to reconstruct the class prototypes of the training dataset from the test dataset images. We then use this model to obtain attention scores that enable to identify and localize areas of interest and consequently guide the classification process. The proposed approach enabled a domain-adaptation from multi-class identification with individual species, into multi-label classification from high-resolution vegetation plots. Our method achieved fifth place in the PlantCLEF 2025 challenge on the private leaderboard, with an F1 score of 0.33331. Besides that, in absolute terms our method scored 0.03 lower than the top-performing submission, suggesting that it may achieved competitive performance in the benchmark task. Our code is available at \href{https://github.com/ADAM-UEFS/PlantCLEF2025}{https://github.com/ADAM-UEFS/PlantCLEF2025}.
Accurate medical image segmentation is essential for clinical diagnosis and treatment planning. While recent interactive foundation models (e.g., nnInteractive) enhance generalization through large-scale multimodal pretraining, they still depend on precise prompts and often perform below expectations in contexts that are underrepresented in their training data. We present AtlasSegFM, an atlas-guided framework that customizes available foundation models to clinical contexts with a single annotated example. The core innovations are: 1) a pipeline that provides context-aware prompts for foundation models via registration between a context atlas and query images, and 2) a test-time adapter to fuse predictions from both atlas registration and the foundation model. Extensive experiments across public and in-house datasets spanning multiple modalities and organs demonstrate that AtlasSegFM consistently improves segmentation, particularly for small, delicate structures. AtlasSegFM provides a lightweight, deployable solution one-shot customization of foundation models in real-world clinical workflows. The code will be made publicly available.
The Segment Anything Model (SAM) enables promptable, high-quality segmentation but is often too computationally expensive for latency-critical settings. TinySAM is a lightweight, distilled SAM variant that preserves strong zero-shot mask quality, yet its "segment-everything" mode still requires hundreds of prompts and remains slow in practice. We first replicate TinySAM on COCO val2017 using official checkpoints, matching the reported AP within 0.03%, establishing a reliable experimental baseline. Building on this, we propose Tiny-YOLOSAM, a fast hybrid pipeline that uses a recent YOLO detector (YOLOv12) to generate box prompts for TinySAM on salient foreground objects, and supplements uncovered regions with sparse point prompts sampled only where YOLO-guided masks provide no coverage. On COCO val2017, the hybrid system substantially improves class-agnostic coverage (AR from 16.4% to 77.1%, mIoU from 19.2% to 67.8%) while reducing end-to-end runtime from 49.20s/image to 10.39s/image (4.7x) on an Apple M1 Pro CPU. These results suggest detector-guided prompting combined with targeted sparse sampling as an effective alternative to dense "segment-everything" prompting for practical full-scene segmentation.
Diabetic Retinopathy (DR) is a leading cause of vision loss worldwide, requiring early detection to preserve sight. Limited access to physicians often leaves DR undiagnosed. To address this, AI models utilize lesion segmentation for interpretability; however, manually annotating lesions is impractical for clinicians. Physicians require a model that explains the reasoning for classifications rather than just highlighting lesion locations. Furthermore, current models are one-dimensional, relying on a single imaging modality for explainability and achieving limited effectiveness. In contrast, a quantitative-detection system that identifies individual DR lesions in natural language would overcome these limitations, enabling diverse applications in screening, treatment, and research settings. To address this issue, this paper presents a novel multimodal explainability model utilizing a VLM with few-shot learning, which mimics an ophthalmologist's reasoning by analyzing lesion distributions within retinal quadrants for fundus images. The model generates paired Grad-CAM heatmaps, showcasing individual neuron weights across both OCT and fundus images, which visually highlight the regions contributing to DR severity classification. Using a dataset of 3,000 fundus images and 1,000 OCT images, this innovative methodology addresses key limitations in current DR diagnostics, offering a practical and comprehensive tool for improving patient outcomes.
Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation (WSSS) with image level labels aims to produce pixel level predictions without requiring dense annotations. While recent approaches have leveraged generative models to augment existing data, they remain dependent on real world training samples. In this paper, we introduce a novel direction, Zero Shot Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation (ZSWSSS), and propose SynthSeg Agents, a multi agent framework driven by Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate synthetic training data entirely without real images. SynthSeg Agents comprises two key modules, a Self Refine Prompt Agent and an Image Generation Agent. The Self Refine Prompt Agent autonomously crafts diverse and semantically rich image prompts via iterative refinement, memory mechanisms, and prompt space exploration, guided by CLIP based similarity and nearest neighbor diversity filtering. These prompts are then passed to the Image Generation Agent, which leverages Vision Language Models (VLMs) to synthesize candidate images. A frozen CLIP scoring model is employed to select high quality samples, and a ViT based classifier is further trained to relabel the entire synthetic dataset with improved semantic precision. Our framework produces high quality training data without any real image supervision. Experiments on PASCAL VOC 2012 and COCO 2014 show that SynthSeg Agents achieves competitive performance without using real training images. This highlights the potential of LLM driven agents in enabling cost efficient and scalable semantic segmentation.
With the rapid progress of controllable generation, training data synthesis has become a promising way to expand labeled datasets and alleviate manual annotation in remote sensing (RS). However, the complexity of semantic mask control and the uncertainty of sampling quality often limit the utility of synthetic data in downstream semantic segmentation tasks. To address these challenges, we propose a task-oriented data synthesis framework (TODSynth), including a Multimodal Diffusion Transformer (MM-DiT) with unified triple attention and a plug-and-play sampling strategy guided by task feedback. Built upon the powerful DiT-based generative foundation model, we systematically evaluate different control schemes, showing that a text-image-mask joint attention scheme combined with full fine-tuning of the image and mask branches significantly enhances the effectiveness of RS semantic segmentation data synthesis, particularly in few-shot and complex-scene scenarios. Furthermore, we propose a control-rectify flow matching (CRFM) method, which dynamically adjusts sampling directions guided by semantic loss during the early high-plasticity stage, mitigating the instability of generated images and bridging the gap between synthetic data and downstream segmentation tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms state-of-the-art controllable generation methods, producing more stable and task-oriented synthetic data for RS semantic segmentation.
Multi-modal large language models that have image output are emerging. Many image generation benchmarks focus on aesthetics instead of fine-grained generation capabilities. In PixelArena, we propose using semantic segmentation tasks to objectively examine their fine-grained generative intelligence with pixel precision. We find the latest Gemini 3 Pro Image has emergent image generation capabilities that generate semantic masks with high fidelity under zero-shot settings, showcasing visual intelligence unseen before and true generalization in new image generation tasks. We further investigate its results, compare them qualitatively and quantitatively with those of other models, and present failure cases. The findings not only signal exciting progress in the field but also provide insights into future research related to multimodality, reasoning, interpretability and benchmarking.