{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/causalclipseg-unlocking-clip-s-potential-in","title":"CausalCLIPSeg: Unlocking CLIP's Potential in Referring Medical Image Segmentation with Causal Intervention","arxiv_id":"2503.15949","date":"2025-03-20","proceeding":null,"authors":["Yaxiong Chen","Minghong Wei","Zixuan Zheng","Jingliang Hu","Yilei Shi","Shengwu Xiong","Xiao Xiang Zhu","Lichao Mou"],"abstract":"Referring medical image segmentation targets delineating lesions indicated by textual descriptions. Aligning visual and textual cues is challenging due to their distinct data properties. Inspired by large-scale pre-trained vision-language models, we propose CausalCLIPSeg, an end-to-end framework for referring medical image segmentation that leverages CLIP. Despite not being trained on medical data, we enforce CLIP's rich semantic space onto the medical domain by a tailored cross-modal decoding method to achieve text-to-pixel alignment. Furthermore, to mitigate confounding bias that may cause the model to learn spurious correlations instead of meaningful causal relationships, CausalCLIPSeg introduces a causal intervention module which self-annotates confounders and excavates causal features from inputs for segmentation judgments. We also devise an adversarial min-max game to optimize causal features while penalizing confounding ones. Extensive experiments demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of our proposed method. Code is available at https://github.com/WUTCM-Lab/CausalCLIPSeg.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.15949v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.15949v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"causalclipseg-unlocking-clip-s-potential-in","repo_url":"https://github.com/wutcm-lab/causalclipseg","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"image-segmentation","task_name":"Image Segmentation"},{"task_slug":"medical-image-segmentation","task_name":"Medical Image Segmentation"},{"task_slug":"segmentation","task_name":"Segmentation"},{"task_slug":"semantic-segmentation","task_name":"Semantic Segmentation"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"clip","method_name":"CLIP"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}