# Exploring Simple Open-Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation

Source: [Exploring Simple Open-Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation](<https://www.sota2.com/research/paper/68fa71f91e209131cea53d93>)

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

Data updated: 2025-10-26T02:16:25.405Z

Authors: Zihang Lai

Published: 2024-01-22T18:59:29.000Z

## Abstract

Open-vocabulary semantic segmentation models aim to accurately assign a semantic label to each pixel in an image from a set of arbitrary open-vocabulary texts. In order to learn such pixel-level alignment, current approaches typically rely on a combination of (i) image-level VL model (e.g. CLIP), (ii) ground truth masks, and (iii) custom grouping encoders. In this paper, we introduce S-Seg, a novel model that can achieve surprisingly strong performance without depending on any of the above elements. S-Seg leverages pseudo-mask and language to train a MaskFormer, and can be easily trained from publicly available image-text datasets. Contrary to prior works, our model directly trains for pixel-level features and language alignment. Once trained, S-Seg generalizes well to multiple testing datasets without requiring fine-tuning. In addition, S-Seg has the extra benefits of scalability with data and consistently improvement when augmented with self-training. We believe that our simple yet effective approach will serve as a solid baseline for future research.

## 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.

- [Semantic Segmentation on Pascal Object (val)](<https://www.sota2.com/research/sota/semantic-segmentation-on-pascal-object-val.md>): Semantic segmentation; Pascal Object (val); mIoU: 30.3.

## Original sources and implementation

[Original paper](<https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.12217>)

[PDF](<https://arxiv.org/pdf/2401.12217.pdf>)
