Papers › Diffuse, Attend, and Segment: Unsupervised Zero-Shot Segmentation using Stable Diffusion

Diffuse, Attend, and Segment: Unsupervised Zero-Shot Segmentation using Stable Diffusion

23 Aug 2023arXiv:2308.12469archive 2025-07-28

Junjiao Tian, Lavisha Aggarwal, Andrea Colaco, Zsolt Kira, Mar Gonzalez-Franco

Producing quality segmentation masks for images is a fundamental problem in computer vision. Recent research has explored large-scale supervised training to enable zero-shot segmentation on virtually any image style and unsupervised training to enable segmentation without dense annotations. However, constructing a model capable of segmenting anything in a zero-shot manner without any annotations is still challenging. In this paper, we propose to utilize the self-attention layers in stable diffusion models to achieve this goal because the pre-trained stable diffusion model has learned inherent concepts of objects within its attention layers. Specifically, we introduce a simple yet effective iterative merging process based on measuring KL divergence among attention maps to merge them into valid segmentation masks. The proposed method does not require any training or language dependency to extract quality segmentation for any images. On COCO-Stuff-27, our method surpasses the prior unsupervised zero-shot SOTA method by an absolute 26% in pixel accuracy and 17% in mean IoU. The project page is at \url{https://sites.google.com/view/diffseg/home}.

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find_edges google/diffseg/diffseg/utils.py official repository ran MIT (permissive) · 023a352094863b2c · report
hungarian_matching google/diffseg/diffseg/utils.py official repository ran MIT (permissive) · 7c271596415d695e · report
process_image google/diffseg/diffseg/utils.py official repository ran MIT (permissive) · 145bd246f65e64ca · report

Tasks

SegmentationSemantic SegmentationZero Shot Segmentation

1 archive task tag without a task page not shown.

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Semantic Segmentation COCO-Stuff-27 DiffSeg (512) Pixel Accuracy 72.5 #1 of 1 Archive leaderboard report
Semantic Segmentation COCO-Stuff-27 DiffSeg (512) mIoU 43.6 #1 of 1 Archive leaderboard report
Semantic Segmentation Cityscapes DiffSeg (512) Pixel Accuracy 76 #2 of 2 Archive leaderboard report
Semantic Segmentation Cityscapes DiffSeg (512) mIoU 21.2 #2 of 2 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

Diffusion

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