Papers › Masked-attention Mask Transformer for Universal Image Segmentation
Masked-attention Mask Transformer for Universal Image Segmentation
2 Dec 2021CVPR 2022 1arXiv:2112.01527archive 2025-07-28
Bowen Cheng, Ishan Misra, Alexander G. Schwing, Alexander Kirillov, Rohit Girdhar
Image segmentation is about grouping pixels with different semantics, e.g., category or instance membership, where each choice of semantics defines a task. While only the semantics of each task differ, current research focuses on designing specialized architectures for each task. We present Masked-attention Mask Transformer (Mask2Former), a new architecture capable of addressing any image segmentation task (panoptic, instance or semantic). Its key components include masked attention, which extracts localized features by constraining cross-attention within predicted mask regions. In addition to reducing the research effort by at least three times, it outperforms the best specialized architectures by a significant margin on four popular datasets. Most notably, Mask2Former sets a new state-of-the-art for panoptic segmentation (57.8 PQ on COCO), instance segmentation (50.1 AP on COCO) and semantic segmentation (57.7 mIoU on ADE20K).
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="2112.01527")
Code
Syntology Ran 2 of 8 code samples harvested from 1 repository linked to this paper; 6 have no recorded run. Of those that ran: 1 ran · our draft was wrong; 1 ran · fixture could not drive it.
By repository: community (archive-listed): 8 samples from 1 repository, 2 ran. The run record, sample by sample. “Ran” means executed on a synthesized input, not that the code is correct or reproduces the paper.
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
8 samples harvested; 2 ran; 0 honoured the contract we drafted; 6 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.
1ran · our draft was wrong
1ran · fixture could not drive it
6unverified
Licence: 0 of the 8 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 DdeGeus/Mask2Former-IBS. “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.
Tasks
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
| Task | Dataset | Model | Metric | Value | Rank at snapshot | Leaderboard | Report |
| 2D Semantic Segmentation |
WildScenes |
Mask2Former (Swin-L) |
mIoU |
47.85 |
#1 of 5 |
Archive leaderboard |
report |
| 2D Semantic Segmentation |
WildScenes |
Mask2Former (ResNet-50) |
mIoU |
43.71 |
#3 of 5 |
Archive leaderboard |
report |
| Instance Segmentation |
ADE20K val |
Mask2Former (Swin-L, single-scale) |
AP |
34.9 |
#11 of 14 |
Archive leaderboard |
report |
| Instance Segmentation |
ADE20K val |
Mask2Former (Swin-L, single-scale) |
APL |
54.7 |
#11 of 14 |
Archive leaderboard |
report |
| Instance Segmentation |
ADE20K val |
Mask2Former (Swin-L, single-scale) |
APM |
40 |
#11 of 14 |
Archive leaderboard |
report |
| Instance Segmentation |
ADE20K val |
Mask2Former (Swin-L, single-scale) |
APS |
16.3 |
#11 of 14 |
Archive leaderboard |
report |
| Instance Segmentation |
ADE20K val |
Mask2Former (Swin-L + FAPN) |
AP |
33.4 |
#12 of 14 |
Archive leaderboard |
report |
| Instance Segmentation |
ADE20K val |
Mask2Former (Swin-L + FAPN) |
APL |
54.6 |
#12 of 14 |
Archive leaderboard |
report |
| Instance Segmentation |
ADE20K val |
Mask2Former (Swin-L + FAPN) |
APM |
37.6 |
#12 of 14 |
Archive leaderboard |
report |
| Instance Segmentation |
ADE20K val |
Mask2Former (Swin-L + FAPN) |
APS |
14.6 |
#12 of 14 |
Archive leaderboard |
report |
| Instance Segmentation |
ADE20K val |
Mask2Former (ResNet50) |
AP |
26.4 |
#13 of 14 |
Archive leaderboard |
report |
| Instance Segmentation |
ADE20K val |
Mask2Former (ResNet50) |
APS |
10.4 |
#13 of 14 |
Archive leaderboard |
report |
| Instance Segmentation |
ADE20K val |
Mask2Former (ResNet-50) |
APL |
43.1 |
#14 of 14 |
Archive leaderboard |
report |
| Instance Segmentation |
ADE20K val |
Mask2Former (ResNet-50) |
APM |
28.9 |
#14 of 14 |
Archive leaderboard |
report |
| Instance Segmentation |
COCO minival |
Mask2Former (Swin-L) |
mask AP |
50.1 |
#26 of 93 |
Archive leaderboard |
report |
| Instance Segmentation |
COCO test-dev |
Mask2Former (Swin-L, single scale) |
AP50 |
74.9 |
#21 of 112 |
Archive leaderboard |
report |
| Instance Segmentation |
COCO test-dev |
Mask2Former (Swin-L, single scale) |
AP75 |
54.9 |
#21 of 112 |
Archive leaderboard |
report |
| Instance Segmentation |
COCO test-dev |
Mask2Former (Swin-L, single scale) |
APL |
71.2 |
#21 of 112 |
Archive leaderboard |
report |
| Instance Segmentation |
COCO test-dev |
Mask2Former (Swin-L, single scale) |
APM |
53.8 |
#21 of 112 |
Archive leaderboard |
report |
| Instance Segmentation |
COCO test-dev |
Mask2Former (Swin-L, single scale) |
APS |
29.1 |
#21 of 112 |
Archive leaderboard |
report |
| Instance Segmentation |
COCO test-dev |
Mask2Former (Swin-L, single scale) |
mask AP |
50.5 |
#21 of 112 |
Archive leaderboard |
report |
| Instance Segmentation |
COCO val (panoptic labels) |
Mask2Former (Swin-L, single-scale) |
AP |
49.1 |
#3 of 4 |
Archive leaderboard |
report |
| Instance Segmentation |
Cityscapes val |
Mask2Former (Swin-L, single-scale) |
mask AP |
43.7 |
#9 of 17 |
Archive leaderboard |
report |
| Instance Segmentation |
Cityscapes val |
Mask2Former (Swin-B) |
mask AP |
42 |
#10 of 17 |
Archive leaderboard |
report |
| Instance Segmentation |
Cityscapes val |
Mask2Former (Swin-S) |
mask AP |
41.8 |
#11 of 17 |
Archive leaderboard |
report |
| Instance Segmentation |
Cityscapes val |
Mask2Former (Swin-T) |
mask AP |
39.7 |
#13 of 17 |
Archive leaderboard |
report |
| Instance Segmentation |
Cityscapes val |
Mask2Former (ResNet-101) |
mask AP |
38.5 |
#14 of 17 |
Archive leaderboard |
report |
| Instance Segmentation |
Cityscapes val |
Mask2Former (ResNet-50) |
mask AP |
37.4 |
#15 of 17 |
Archive leaderboard |
report |
| Panoptic Segmentation |
ADE20K val |
Mask2Former (Swin-L) |
AP |
34.2 |
#18 of 25 |
Archive leaderboard |
report |
| Panoptic Segmentation |
ADE20K val |
Mask2Former (Swin-L) |
PQ |
48.1 |
#18 of 25 |
Archive leaderboard |
report |
| Panoptic Segmentation |
ADE20K val |
Mask2Former (Swin-L) |
mIoU |
54.5 |
#18 of 25 |
Archive leaderboard |
report |
| Panoptic Segmentation |
ADE20K val |
Mask2Former (Swin-L + FAPN, 640x640) |
AP |
33.2 |
#19 of 25 |
Archive leaderboard |
report |
| Panoptic Segmentation |
ADE20K val |
Mask2Former (Swin-L + FAPN, 640x640) |
PQ |
46.2 |
#19 of 25 |
Archive leaderboard |
report |
| Panoptic Segmentation |
ADE20K val |
Mask2Former (Swin-L + FAPN, 640x640) |
mIoU |
55.4 |
#19 of 25 |
Archive leaderboard |
report |
| Panoptic Segmentation |
ADE20K val |
Mask2Former (ResNet-50, 640x640) |
PQ |
39.7 |
#22 of 25 |
Archive leaderboard |
report |
| Panoptic Segmentation |
ADE20K val |
Panoptic-DeepLab (SwideRNet) |
PQ |
37.9 |
#23 of 25 |
Archive leaderboard |
report |
| Panoptic Segmentation |
ADE20K val |
Panoptic-DeepLab (SwideRNet) |
mIoU |
50 |
#23 of 25 |
Archive leaderboard |
report |
| Panoptic Segmentation |
ADE20K val |
Mask2Former (ResNet-50, 640x640) |
AP |
26.5 |
#25 of 25 |
Archive leaderboard |
report |
| Panoptic Segmentation |
ADE20K val |
Mask2Former (ResNet-50, 640x640) |
mIoU |
46.1 |
#25 of 25 |
Archive leaderboard |
report |
| Panoptic Segmentation |
COCO minival |
Mask2Former (single-scale) |
AP |
48.6 |
#18 of 31 |
Archive leaderboard |
report |
| Panoptic Segmentation |
COCO minival |
Mask2Former (single-scale) |
PQ |
57.8 |
#18 of 31 |
Archive leaderboard |
report |
| Panoptic Segmentation |
COCO minival |
Mask2Former (single-scale) |
PQst |
48.1 |
#18 of 31 |
Archive leaderboard |
report |
| Panoptic Segmentation |
COCO minival |
Mask2Former (single-scale) |
PQth |
64.2 |
#18 of 31 |
Archive leaderboard |
report |
| Panoptic Segmentation |
COCO test-dev |
Mask2Former (Swin-L) |
PQ |
58.3 |
#3 of 38 |
Archive leaderboard |
report |
| Panoptic Segmentation |
COCO test-dev |
Mask2Former (Swin-L) |
PQst |
48.1 |
#3 of 38 |
Archive leaderboard |
report |
| Panoptic Segmentation |
COCO test-dev |
Mask2Former (Swin-L) |
PQth |
65.1 |
#3 of 38 |
Archive leaderboard |
report |
| Panoptic Segmentation |
Cityscapes val |
Mask2Former (Swin-L) |
AP |
43.6 |
#15 of 37 |
Archive leaderboard |
report |
| Panoptic Segmentation |
Cityscapes val |
Mask2Former (Swin-L) |
PQ |
66.6 |
#15 of 37 |
Archive leaderboard |
report |
| Panoptic Segmentation |
Cityscapes val |
Mask2Former (Swin-L) |
mIoU |
82.9 |
#15 of 37 |
Archive leaderboard |
report |
| Semantic Segmentation |
ADE20K |
Mask2Former (SwinL-FaPN) |
Validation mIoU |
57.7 |
#27 of 235 |
Archive leaderboard |
report |
| Semantic Segmentation |
ADE20K |
Mask2Former (SwinL) |
Validation mIoU |
57.3 |
#33 of 235 |
Archive leaderboard |
report |
| Semantic Segmentation |
ADE20K |
Mask2Former (Swin-L-FaPN) |
Validation mIoU |
56.4 |
#40 of 235 |
Archive leaderboard |
report |
| Semantic Segmentation |
ADE20K |
Mask2Former(Swin-B) |
Validation mIoU |
55.1 |
#50 of 235 |
Archive leaderboard |
report |
| Semantic Segmentation |
ADE20K val |
Mask2Former (Swin-L-FaPN, multiscale) |
mIoU |
57.7 |
#18 of 95 |
Archive leaderboard |
report |
| Semantic Segmentation |
ADE20K val |
Mask2Former (Swin-L-FaPN) |
mIoU |
56.4 |
#25 of 95 |
Archive leaderboard |
report |
| Semantic Segmentation |
COCO (Common Objects in Context) |
Mask2Former (Swin-L, single-scale) |
mIoU |
67.4 |
#7 of 9 |
Archive leaderboard |
report |
| Semantic Segmentation |
COCO (Common Objects in Context) |
MaskFormer (Swin-L, single-scale) |
mIoU |
64.8 |
#8 of 9 |
Archive leaderboard |
report |
| Semantic Segmentation |
Cityscapes val |
Mask2Former (Swin-L) |
mIoU |
84.3 |
#19 of 99 |
Archive leaderboard |
report |
| Semantic Segmentation |
Fine-Grained Grass Segmentation Dataset |
Mask2Former |
mIoU |
44.93 |
#10 of 10 |
Archive leaderboard |
report |
| Semantic Segmentation |
Mapillary val |
Mask2Former (Swin-L, multiscale) |
mIoU |
64.7 |
#3 of 8 |
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
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