Papers › SAPA: Similarity-Aware Point Affiliation for Feature Upsampling

SAPA: Similarity-Aware Point Affiliation for Feature Upsampling

26 Sep 2022arXiv:2209.12866archive 2025-07-28

Hao Lu, Wenze Liu, Zixuan Ye, Hongtao Fu, Yuliang Liu, Zhiguo Cao

We introduce point affiliation into feature upsampling, a notion that describes the affiliation of each upsampled point to a semantic cluster formed by local decoder feature points with semantic similarity. By rethinking point affiliation, we present a generic formulation for generating upsampling kernels. The kernels encourage not only semantic smoothness but also boundary sharpness in the upsampled feature maps. Such properties are particularly useful for some dense prediction tasks such as semantic segmentation. The key idea of our formulation is to generate similarity-aware kernels by comparing the similarity between each encoder feature point and the spatially associated local region of decoder features. In this way, the encoder feature point can function as a cue to inform the semantic cluster of upsampled feature points. To embody the formulation, we further instantiate a lightweight upsampling operator, termed Similarity-Aware Point Affiliation (SAPA), and investigate its variants. SAPA invites consistent performance improvements on a number of dense prediction tasks, including semantic segmentation, object detection, depth estimation, and image matting. Code is available at: https://github.com/poppinace/sapa

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poppinace/sapa officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubpytorchMIT report
tiny-smart/sapa mentioned on GitHubpytorch report

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Tasks

DecoderDepth EstimationFeature UpsamplingImage MattingObject DetectionSemantic SegmentationSemantic SimilaritySemantic Textual Similarityobject-detection

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Feature Upsampling ImageNet SAPA ADCC 55.4 #7 of 8 Archive leaderboard report
Feature Upsampling ImageNet SAPA Average Drop 8.5 #7 of 8 Archive leaderboard report
Feature Upsampling ImageNet SAPA Average Increase 32.7 #7 of 8 Archive leaderboard report

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