Papers › Question-Answer Cross Language Image Matching for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation

Question-Answer Cross Language Image Matching for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation

18 Jan 2024arXiv:2401.09883archive 2025-07-28

Songhe Deng, Wei Zhuo, Jinheng Xie, Linlin Shen

Class Activation Map (CAM) has emerged as a popular tool for weakly supervised semantic segmentation (WSSS), allowing the localization of object regions in an image using only image-level labels. However, existing CAM methods suffer from under-activation of target object regions and false-activation of background regions due to the fact that a lack of detailed supervision can hinder the model's ability to understand the image as a whole. In this paper, we propose a novel Question-Answer Cross-Language-Image Matching framework for WSSS (QA-CLIMS), leveraging the vision-language foundation model to maximize the text-based understanding of images and guide the generation of activation maps. First, a series of carefully designed questions are posed to the VQA (Visual Question Answering) model with Question-Answer Prompt Engineering (QAPE) to generate a corpus of both foreground target objects and backgrounds that are adaptive to query images. We then employ contrastive learning in a Region Image Text Contrastive (RITC) network to compare the obtained foreground and background regions with the generated corpus. Our approach exploits the rich textual information from the open vocabulary as additional supervision, enabling the model to generate high-quality CAMs with a more complete object region and reduce false-activation of background regions. We conduct extensive analysis to validate the proposed method and show that our approach performs state-of-the-art on both PASCAL VOC 2012 and MS COCO datasets. Code is available at: https://github.com/CVI-SZU/QA-CLIMS

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make_cam cvi-szu/qa-clims/step/make_clims.py official repository ran fingerprinted MIT (permissive) · 24f97933bc49cab7 · report
preprocess cvi-szu/qa-clims/step/train_qa_clims.py official repository ran fingerprinted MIT (permissive) · e1c280d662e89083 · report
resnet50 cvi-szu/qa-clims/net/resnet50.py official repository ran MIT (permissive) · 39c2c070ce06a6f8 · report
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Tasks

Contrastive LearningPrompt EngineeringQuestion AnsweringSemantic SegmentationVisual Question AnsweringVisual Question Answering (VQA)Weakly supervised Semantic SegmentationWeakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation PASCAL VOC 2012 test QA-CLIMS Mean IoU 75.5 #7 of 60 Archive leaderboard report
Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation PASCAL VOC 2012 val QA-CLIMS Mean IoU 75.6 #9 of 73 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

CAMContrastive Learning

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