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No time to train! Training-Free Reference-Based Instance Segmentation

2025-07-03Code Available3· sign in to hype

Miguel Espinosa, Chenhongyi Yang, Linus Ericsson, Steven McDonagh, Elliot J. Crowley

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Abstract

The performance of image segmentation models has historically been constrained by the high cost of collecting large-scale annotated data. The Segment Anything Model (SAM) alleviates this original problem through a promptable, semantics-agnostic, segmentation paradigm and yet still requires manual visual-prompts or complex domain-dependent prompt-generation rules to process a new image. Towards reducing this new burden, our work investigates the task of object segmentation when provided with, alternatively, only a small set of reference images. Our key insight is to leverage strong semantic priors, as learned by foundation models, to identify corresponding regions between a reference and a target image. We find that correspondences enable automatic generation of instance-level segmentation masks for downstream tasks and instantiate our ideas via a multi-stage, training-free method incorporating (1) memory bank construction; (2) representation aggregation and (3) semantic-aware feature matching. Our experiments show significant improvements on segmentation metrics, leading to state-of-the-art performance on COCO FSOD (36.8% nAP), PASCAL VOC Few-Shot (71.2% nAP50) and outperforming existing training-free approaches on the Cross-Domain FSOD benchmark (22.4% nAP).

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Benchmark Results

DatasetModelMetricClaimedVerifiedStatus
MS-COCO (10-shot)Training-freeAP36.6Unverified
MS-COCO (1-shot)Training-freeAP26.5Unverified
MS-COCO (30-shot)Training-freeAP36.8Unverified

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