Papers › Autoregressive Unsupervised Image Segmentation

Autoregressive Unsupervised Image Segmentation

16 Jul 2020ECCV 2020 8arXiv:2007.08247archive 2025-07-28

Yassine Ouali, Céline Hudelot, Myriam Tami

In this work, we propose a new unsupervised image segmentation approach based on mutual information maximization between different constructed views of the inputs. Taking inspiration from autoregressive generative models that predict the current pixel from past pixels in a raster-scan ordering created with masked convolutions, we propose to use different orderings over the inputs using various forms of masked convolutions to construct different views of the data. For a given input, the model produces a pair of predictions with two valid orderings, and is then trained to maximize the mutual information between the two outputs. These outputs can either be low-dimensional features for representation learning or output clusters corresponding to semantic labels for clustering. While masked convolutions are used during training, in inference, no masking is applied and we fall back to the standard convolution where the model has access to the full input. The proposed method outperforms current state-of-the-art on unsupervised image segmentation. It is simple and easy to implement, and can be extended to other visual tasks and integrated seamlessly into existing unsupervised learning methods requiring different views of the data.

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Code

Max-Manning/autoregunsupseg mentioned on GitHubpytorch report

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Tasks

ClusteringImage SegmentationRepresentation LearningSegmentationSemantic SegmentationUnsupervised Image SegmentationUnsupervised Semantic Segmentation

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Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Unsupervised Semantic Segmentation COCO-Stuff-3 AC Pixel Accuracy 72.9 #5 of 6 Archive leaderboard report

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Methods

Convolution

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