Papers › An Alternative to WSSS? An Empirical Study of the Segment Anything Model (SAM) on...

An Alternative to WSSS? An Empirical Study of the Segment Anything Model (SAM) on Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation Problems

2 May 2023arXiv:2305.01586archive 2025-07-28

Weixuan Sun, Zheyuan Liu, Yanhao Zhang, Yiran Zhong, Nick Barnes

The Segment Anything Model (SAM) has demonstrated exceptional performance and versatility, making it a promising tool for various related tasks. In this report, we explore the application of SAM in Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation (WSSS). Particularly, we adapt SAM as the pseudo-label generation pipeline given only the image-level class labels. While we observed impressive results in most cases, we also identify certain limitations. Our study includes performance evaluations on PASCAL VOC and MS-COCO, where we achieved remarkable improvements over the latest state-of-the-art methods on both datasets. We anticipate that this report encourages further explorations of adopting SAM in WSSS, as well as wider real-world applications.

PaperPDFCodeCode Syntology ran

In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

For agents, Syntology's MCP tool lists every function and class Syntology harvested from this paper and whether it ran (how to connect): get_harvested_code_for_paper(arxiv_id="2305.01586")

Code

Syntology Ran 4 of 9 code samples harvested from 1 repository linked to this paper; 5 have no recorded run. Of those that ran: 4 ran · fixture could not drive it.

By repository: official repository: 9 samples from 1 repository, 4 ran. The run record, sample by sample. “Ran” means executed on a synthesized input, not that the code is correct or reproduces the paper.

weixuansun/wsss_sam officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubpytorchMIT report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

9 samples harvested; 4 ran; 0 honoured the contract we drafted; 5 have no recorded run. Read from Syntology's graph 2026-09-24; that is when this build read the record, not when the samples ran.

4ran · fixture could not drive it
5unverified

Licence: 0 of the 9 samples are pointer only, meaning Syntology does not serve that copy's text. This page shows no code text for any sample; each one links to its file in the repository.

Harvested from weixuansun/wsss_sam. “Ran” means the sample executed on a synthesized input. It does not mean the output is correct, and nothing here reproduces the paper's results. “Honoured” and “violated” refer to a contract Syntology drafted from the code itself; “our draft was wrong” and “fixture could not drive it” are failures of Syntology's instrument, not of the code.

Each sample ends with its code_sha256, Syntology's identity for that exact code. An agent fetches the stored sample with Syntology's MCP tool get_code(code_sha256="…") (how to connect); click an identity to copy that call.

Repository labels, per sample. official repository: The archive marks this repository official for the paper. named in the paper: The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official. community (archive-listed): In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper. found in paper text by Syntology: Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted. community: Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested. Samples from a repository marked official are listed first. Licence labels name the repository's licence as recorded at harvest. “Pointer only” means Syntology does not serve that copy's text, for one of four reasons: no licence file was found; the licence was not identified; the licence is recorded as permissive but that copy's record is not marked cleared; or the licence is outside the permissive list Syntology serves text under (MIT, Apache-2.0, BSD and similar). Some licences outside that list permit redistribution, such as WTFPL, and GPL-3.0 under its conditions; they are simply not on the list. Hover a licence label for the reason. File links open the file on GitHub at the default branch, which may have changed since the harvest.

get_rel_pos weixuansun/wsss_sam/segment_anything/segment_anything/modeling/image_encoder.py official repository ran · fixture could not drive it MIT (permissive) · 733d7f0bedcb74c2 · report
plot_boxes_to_image weixuansun/wsss_sam/GroundingDINO/demo/inference_on_a_image.py official repository ran · fixture could not drive it MIT (permissive) · fc8e66880eafacfe · report
window_partition weixuansun/wsss_sam/segment_anything/segment_anything/modeling/image_encoder.py official repository ran · fixture could not drive it fingerprinted MIT (permissive) · 105fa08885dc36cc · report
window_unpartition weixuansun/wsss_sam/segment_anything/segment_anything/modeling/image_encoder.py official repository ran · fixture could not drive it MIT (permissive) · 50f37d517e2be27f · report
build_sam_vit_b weixuansun/wsss_sam/segment_anything/segment_anything/build_sam.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · f9bc5f31ce61cee8 · report
build_sam_vit_h weixuansun/wsss_sam/segment_anything/segment_anything/build_sam.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · 6b77c1f11fff3ed6 · report
build_sam_vit_l weixuansun/wsss_sam/segment_anything/segment_anything/build_sam.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · 3f8890e695469246 · report
getImgId weixuansun/wsss_sam/process_coco.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · 89c3258caa90257f · report
get_coco_gt weixuansun/wsss_sam/process_coco.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · a7b8b92f3837cdd6 · report

Tasks

Pseudo LabelSemantic SegmentationWeakly supervised Semantic SegmentationWeakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation COCO 2014 val WSSS-SAM(DeepLabV2-ResNet101) mIoU 55.6 #3 of 39 Archive leaderboard report
Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation PASCAL VOC 2012 test WSSS-SAM(DeepLabV2-ResNet101) Mean IoU 77.1 #6 of 60 Archive leaderboard report
Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation PASCAL VOC 2012 val WSSS-SAM(ResNet-101, multi-stage) Mean IoU 77.2 #7 of 73 Archive leaderboard report

Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.

Methods

SAM

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections