MTA-CLIP: Language-Guided Semantic Segmentation with Mask-Text Alignment

Abstract

Recent approaches have shown that large-scale vision-language models such as CLIP can improve semantic segmentation performance. These methods typically aim for pixel-level vision-language alignment, but often rely on low-resolution image features from CLIP, resulting in class ambiguities along boundaries. Moreover, the global scene representations in CLIP text embeddings do not directly correlate with the local and detailed pixel-level features, making meaningful alignment more difficult. To address these limitations, we introduce MTA-CLIP, a novel framework employing mask-level vision-language alignment. Specifically, we first propose Mask-Text Decoder that enhances the mask representations using rich textual data with the CLIP language model. Subsequently, it aligns mask representations with text embeddings using Mask-to-Text Contrastive Learning. Furthermore, we introduce Mask-Text Prompt Learning, utilizing multiple context-specific prompts for text embeddings to capture diverse class representations across masks. Overall, MTA-CLIP achieves state-of-the-art, surpassing prior works by an average of 2.8% and 1.3% on standard benchmark datasets, ADE20k and Cityscapes, respectively.