CLIP as RNN: Segment Countless Visual Concepts Without Training Endeavor

Abstract

Existing open-vocabulary image segmentation methods require a fine-tuning step on mask labels and/or image-text datasets. Mask labels are labor-intensive which limits the number of categories in segmentation datasets. Consequently the vocabulary capacity of pre-trained VLMs is severely reduced after fine-tuning. However without fine-tuning VLMs trained under weak image-text supervision tend to make suboptimal mask predictions. To alleviate these issues we introduce a novel recurrent framework that progressively filters out irrelevant texts and enhances mask quality without training efforts. The recurrent unit is a two-stage segmenter built upon a frozen VLM. Thus our model retains the VLM's broad vocabulary space and equips it with segmentation ability. Experiments show that our method outperforms not only the training-free counterparts but also those fine-tuned with millions of data samples and sets the new state-of-the-art records for both zero-shot semantic and referring segmentation. Concretely we improve the current record by 28.8 16.0 and 6.9 mIoU on Pascal VOC COCO Object and Pascal Context.