# CAM-Seg: A Continuous-valued Embedding Approach for Semantic Image Generation

Source: [CAM-Seg: A Continuous-valued Embedding Approach for Semantic Image Generation](<https://www.sota2.com/research/paper/68fa777f1e209131cea7395c>)

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

Data updated: 2025-10-26T04:20:40.032Z

Authors: Masud Ahmed, Zahid Hasan, Syed Arefinul Haque, Abu Zaher Md Faridee, Sanjay Purushotham, Suya You, Nirmalya Roy

Published: 2025-03-19T18:06:54.000Z

## Abstract

Traditional transformer-based semantic segmentation relies on quantized embeddings. However, our analysis reveals that autoencoder accuracy on segmentation mask using quantized embeddings (e.g. VQ-VAE) is 8% lower than continuous-valued embeddings (e.g. KL-VAE). Motivated by this, we propose a continuous-valued embedding framework for semantic segmentation. By reformulating semantic mask generation as a continuous image-to-embedding diffusion process, our approach eliminates the need for discrete latent representations while preserving fine-grained spatial and semantic details. Our key contribution includes a diffusion-guided autoregressive transformer that learns a continuous semantic embedding space by modeling long-range dependencies in image features. Our framework contains a unified architecture combining a VAE encoder for continuous feature extraction, a diffusion-guided transformer for conditioned embedding generation, and a VAE decoder for semantic mask reconstruction. Our setting facilitates zero-shot domain adaptation capabilities enabled by the continuity of the embedding space. Experiments across diverse datasets (e.g., Cityscapes and domain-shifted variants) demonstrate state-of-the-art robustness to distribution shifts, including adverse weather (e.g., fog, snow) and viewpoint variations. Our model also exhibits strong noise resilience, achieving robust performance ($\\approx$ 95% AP compared to baseline) under gaussian noise, moderate motion blur, and moderate brightness/contrast variations, while experiencing only a moderate impact ($\\approx$ 90% AP compared to baseline) from 50% salt and pepper noise, saturation and hue shifts. Code available: https://github.com/mahmed10/CAMSS.git

## Recorded benchmark results

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## Original sources and implementation

[Original paper](<https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.15617>)

[PDF](<https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.15617.pdf>)
