# ICPC: Instance-Conditioned Prompting with Contrastive Learning for Semantic Segmentation

Source: [ICPC: Instance-Conditioned Prompting with Contrastive Learning for Semantic Segmentation](<https://www.sota2.com/research/paper/68fa705a1e209131cea4a800>)

Collection index: [llms.txt](<https://www.sota2.com/research/llms.txt>)

Data updated: 2025-10-26T01:39:07.726Z

Authors: Chaohui Yu, Qiang Zhou, Zhibin Wang, Fan Wang

Published: 2023-08-14T11:21:47.000Z

## Abstract

Modern supervised semantic segmentation methods are usually finetuned based on the supervised or self-supervised models pre-trained on ImageNet. Recent work shows that transferring the knowledge from CLIP to semantic segmentation via prompt learning can achieve promising performance. The performance boost comes from the feature enhancement with multimodal alignment, i.e., the dot product between vision and text embeddings. However, how to improve the multimodal alignment for better transfer performance in dense tasks remains underexplored. In this work, we focus on improving the quality of vision-text alignment from two aspects of prompting design and loss function, and present an instance-conditioned prompting with contrastive learning (ICPC) framework. First, compared with the static prompt designs, we reveal that dynamic prompting conditioned on image content can more efficiently utilize the text encoder for complex dense tasks. Second, we propose an align-guided contrastive loss to refine the alignment of vision and text embeddings. We further propose lightweight multi-scale alignment for better performance. Extensive experiments on three large-scale datasets (ADE20K, COCO-Stuff10k, and ADE20K-Full) demonstrate that ICPC brings consistent improvements across diverse backbones. Taking ResNet-50 as an example, ICPC outperforms the state-of-the-art counterpart by 1.71%, 1.05%, and 1.41% mIoU on the three datasets, respectively.

## Recorded benchmark results

A research result applies to its stated dataset, split, metric and evaluation configuration. Compare like-for-like settings, preserve the metric's unit and direction, and distinguish paper-reported results from independent reproduction. The best result recorded here is not a claim of exhaustive, current global coverage.

## Original sources and implementation

[Original paper](<https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.07078>)

[PDF](<https://arxiv.org/pdf/2308.07078.pdf>)
