# DINOde: Continuous Vision-Text Alignment for Open-Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation

Source: [DINOde: Continuous Vision-Text Alignment for Open-Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation](<https://www.sota2.com/research/paper/6a62f195ef5cfba72b4989cb>)

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

Data updated: 2026-07-25T05:00:13.493Z

Authors: Sung-Hoon Yoon, Hoyong Kwon, Changgyoon Oh, Kuk-Jin Yoon

Published: 2026-07-23T14:37:27.000Z

## Abstract

Open-vocabulary semantic segmentation (OVSS) leverages textual semantics to segment objects beyond predefined categories. While the self-supervised model DINOv3 provides strong structured visual representations, its lack of native textual alignment hinders its direct application to OVSS. To bridge this gap, we propose DINOde, an ODE-based framework that continuously aligns CLIP text embeddings with the DINO visual manifold. Our approach employs two complementary components: (i) Semantic Text Flow (STF), which evolves text embeddings toward the DINO manifold through a continuous ODE trajectory, and (ii) Global Context Flow (GCF), which progressively refines the holistic image representation carried by DINO's CLS token. To preserve the hyperspherical geometry of the feature space during this evolution, we further introduce Velocity Tangent Projection, which constrains the learned velocity field to the tangent space. By modeling alignment as a continuous trajectory, DINOde avoids the manifold entanglement inherent in discrete MLP projections and yields more robust cross-modal alignment. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DINOde consistently outperforms existing methods and achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple OVSS benchmarks. The code is available at https://github.com/yoon307/DINOde.

## 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/2607.21371>)

[PDF](<https://arxiv.org/pdf/2607.21371.pdf>)
