TRACE: Your Diffusion Model is Secretly an Instance Edge Detector

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Jo, Sanghyun, Lee, Ziseok, Lee, Wooyeol, Choi, Jonghyun, Park, Jaesik, Kim, Kyungsu
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Jo, Sanghyun
Lee, Ziseok
Lee, Wooyeol
Choi, Jonghyun
Park, Jaesik
Kim, Kyungsu
author_facet Jo, Sanghyun
Lee, Ziseok
Lee, Wooyeol
Choi, Jonghyun
Park, Jaesik
Kim, Kyungsu
contents High-quality instance and panoptic segmentation has traditionally relied on dense instance-level annotations such as masks, boxes, or points, which are costly, inconsistent, and difficult to scale. Unsupervised and weakly-supervised approaches reduce this burden but remain constrained by semantic backbone constraints and human bias, often producing merged or fragmented outputs. We present TRACE (TRAnsforming diffusion Cues to instance Edges), showing that text-to-image diffusion models secretly function as instance edge annotators. TRACE identifies the Instance Emergence Point (IEP) where object boundaries first appear in self-attention maps, extracts boundaries through Attention Boundary Divergence (ABDiv), and distills them into a lightweight one-step edge decoder. This design removes the need for per-image diffusion inversion, achieving 81x faster inference while producing sharper and more connected boundaries. On the COCO benchmark, TRACE improves unsupervised instance segmentation by +5.1 AP, and in tag-supervised panoptic segmentation it outperforms point-supervised baselines by +1.7 PQ without using any instance-level labels. These results reveal that diffusion models encode hidden instance boundary priors, and that decoding these signals offers a practical and scalable alternative to costly manual annotation. Project Page: https://shjo-april.github.io/TRACE/
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_07982
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle TRACE: Your Diffusion Model is Secretly an Instance Edge Detector
Jo, Sanghyun
Lee, Ziseok
Lee, Wooyeol
Choi, Jonghyun
Park, Jaesik
Kim, Kyungsu
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
High-quality instance and panoptic segmentation has traditionally relied on dense instance-level annotations such as masks, boxes, or points, which are costly, inconsistent, and difficult to scale. Unsupervised and weakly-supervised approaches reduce this burden but remain constrained by semantic backbone constraints and human bias, often producing merged or fragmented outputs. We present TRACE (TRAnsforming diffusion Cues to instance Edges), showing that text-to-image diffusion models secretly function as instance edge annotators. TRACE identifies the Instance Emergence Point (IEP) where object boundaries first appear in self-attention maps, extracts boundaries through Attention Boundary Divergence (ABDiv), and distills them into a lightweight one-step edge decoder. This design removes the need for per-image diffusion inversion, achieving 81x faster inference while producing sharper and more connected boundaries. On the COCO benchmark, TRACE improves unsupervised instance segmentation by +5.1 AP, and in tag-supervised panoptic segmentation it outperforms point-supervised baselines by +1.7 PQ without using any instance-level labels. These results reveal that diffusion models encode hidden instance boundary priors, and that decoding these signals offers a practical and scalable alternative to costly manual annotation. Project Page: https://shjo-april.github.io/TRACE/
title TRACE: Your Diffusion Model is Secretly an Instance Edge Detector
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.07982