# Enhancing Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation with Multi-modal Foundation Models: An End-to-End Approach

Source: [Enhancing Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation with Multi-modal Foundation Models: An End-to-End Approach](<https://www.sota2.com/research/paper/68fa73251e209131cea5aad8>)

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

Data updated: 2025-10-27T06:33:04.779Z

Authors: Elham Ravanbakhsh, Cheng Niu, Yongqing Liang, J. Ramanujam, Xin Li

Published: 2024-05-10T16:42:25.000Z

## Abstract

Semantic segmentation is a core computer vision problem, but the high costs of data annotation have hindered its wide application. Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation (WSSS) offers a cost-efficient workaround to extensive labeling in comparison to fully-supervised methods by using partial or incomplete labels. Existing WSSS methods have difficulties in learning the boundaries of objects leading to poor segmentation results. We propose a novel and effective framework that addresses these issues by leveraging visual foundation models inside the bounding box. Adopting a two-stage WSSS framework, our proposed network consists of a pseudo-label generation module and a segmentation module. The first stage leverages Segment Anything Model (SAM) to generate high-quality pseudo-labels. To alleviate the problem of delineating precise boundaries, we adopt SAM inside the bounding box with the help of another pre-trained foundation model (e.g., Grounding-DINO). Furthermore, we eliminate the necessity of using the supervision of image labels, by employing CLIP in classification. Then in the second stage, the generated high-quality pseudo-labels are used to train an off-the-shelf segmenter that achieves the state-of-the-art performance on PASCAL VOC 2012 and MS COCO 2014.

## 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/2405.06586>)

[PDF](<https://arxiv.org/pdf/2405.06586.pdf>)
