Papers › PolyFormer: Referring Image Segmentation as Sequential Polygon Generation

PolyFormer: Referring Image Segmentation as Sequential Polygon Generation

14 Feb 2023CVPR 2023 1arXiv:2302.07387archive 2025-07-28

Jiang Liu, Hui Ding, Zhaowei Cai, Yuting Zhang, Ravi Kumar Satzoda, Vijay Mahadevan, R. Manmatha

In this work, instead of directly predicting the pixel-level segmentation masks, the problem of referring image segmentation is formulated as sequential polygon generation, and the predicted polygons can be later converted into segmentation masks. This is enabled by a new sequence-to-sequence framework, Polygon Transformer (PolyFormer), which takes a sequence of image patches and text query tokens as input, and outputs a sequence of polygon vertices autoregressively. For more accurate geometric localization, we propose a regression-based decoder, which predicts the precise floating-point coordinates directly, without any coordinate quantization error. In the experiments, PolyFormer outperforms the prior art by a clear margin, e.g., 5.40% and 4.52% absolute improvements on the challenging RefCOCO+ and RefCOCOg datasets. It also shows strong generalization ability when evaluated on the referring video segmentation task without fine-tuning, e.g., achieving competitive 61.5% J&F on the Ref-DAVIS17 dataset.

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BatchNorm2d amazon-science/polygon-transformer/models/polyformer/unify_transformer.py official repository ran Apache-2.0 recorded; this copy not marked cleared · pointer only · f18199d037514305 · report
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Tasks

DecoderImage SegmentationQuantizationReferring Expression ComprehensionReferring Expression SegmentationSegmentationSemantic SegmentationVideo SegmentationVideo Semantic Segmentation

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Referring Expression Segmentation DAVIS 2017 (val) PolyFormer-B J&F 1st frame 60.9 #8 of 18 Archive leaderboard report
Referring Expression Segmentation DAVIS 2017 (val) PolyFormer-B Zero-Shot Transfer true #8 of 18 Archive leaderboard report
Referring Expression Segmentation RefCOCO+ test B PolyFormer-L Mean IoU 66.73 #12 of 30 Archive leaderboard report
Referring Expression Segmentation RefCOCO+ test B PolyFormer-L Overall IoU 61.87 #12 of 30 Archive leaderboard report
Referring Expression Segmentation RefCOCO+ test B PolyFormer-B Mean IoU 64.64 #14 of 30 Archive leaderboard report
Referring Expression Segmentation RefCOCO+ test B PolyFormer-B Overall IoU 59.33 #14 of 30 Archive leaderboard report
Referring Expression Segmentation RefCOCO+ testA PolyFormer-L Mean IoU 75.71 #12 of 30 Archive leaderboard report
Referring Expression Segmentation RefCOCO+ testA PolyFormer-L Overall IoU 74.56 #12 of 30 Archive leaderboard report
Referring Expression Segmentation RefCOCO+ testA PolyFormer-B Mean IoU 74.51 #15 of 30 Archive leaderboard report
Referring Expression Segmentation RefCOCO+ testA PolyFormer-B Overall IoU 72.89 #15 of 30 Archive leaderboard report
Referring Expression Segmentation RefCOCO+ val PolyFormer-L Mean IoU 72.15 #16 of 33 Archive leaderboard report
Referring Expression Segmentation RefCOCO+ val PolyFormer-L Overall IoU 69.33 #16 of 33 Archive leaderboard report
Referring Expression Segmentation RefCOCO+ val PolyFormer-B Mean IoU 70.65 #17 of 33 Archive leaderboard report
Referring Expression Segmentation RefCOCO+ val PolyFormer-B Overall IoU 67.64 #17 of 33 Archive leaderboard report
Referring Expression Segmentation RefCOCOg-test PolyFormer-L Mean IoU 71.17 #11 of 18 Archive leaderboard report
Referring Expression Segmentation RefCOCOg-test PolyFormer-L Overall IoU 70.19 #11 of 18 Archive leaderboard report
Referring Expression Segmentation RefCOCOg-test PolyFormer-B Mean IoU 69.88 #12 of 18 Archive leaderboard report
Referring Expression Segmentation RefCOCOg-test PolyFormer-B Overall IoU 69.05 #12 of 18 Archive leaderboard report
Referring Expression Segmentation RefCOCOg-val PolyFormer-L Mean IoU 71.15 #12 of 23 Archive leaderboard report
Referring Expression Segmentation RefCOCOg-val PolyFormer-L Overall IoU 69.2 #12 of 23 Archive leaderboard report
Referring Expression Segmentation RefCOCOg-val PolyFormer-B Mean IoU 69.36 #14 of 23 Archive leaderboard report
Referring Expression Segmentation RefCOCOg-val PolyFormer-B Overall IoU 67.76 #14 of 23 Archive leaderboard report
Referring Expression Segmentation RefCoCo val PolyFormer-L Mean IoU 76.94 #17 of 37 Archive leaderboard report
Referring Expression Segmentation RefCoCo val PolyFormer-L Overall IoU 75.96 #17 of 37 Archive leaderboard report
Referring Expression Segmentation RefCoCo val PolyFormer-B Overall IoU 74.82 #19 of 37 Archive leaderboard report
Referring Expression Segmentation ReferIt PolyFormer-L Mean IoU 67.22 #1 of 3 Archive leaderboard report
Referring Expression Segmentation ReferIt PolyFormer-L Overall IoU 72.6 #1 of 3 Archive leaderboard report
Referring Expression Segmentation ReferIt PolyFormer-B Mean IoU 65.98 #2 of 3 Archive leaderboard report
Referring Expression Segmentation ReferIt PolyFormer-B Overall IoU 71.91 #2 of 3 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

Absolute Position EncodingsAdamAttentionBPEDense ConnectionsDropoutLabel SmoothingLayer NormalizationLinear LayerMulti-Head AttentionPosition-Wise Feed-Forward LayerResidual ConnectionSoftmaxTransformer

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