The Power of One: A Single Example is All it Takes for Segmentation in VLMs

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Hossain, Mir Rayat Imtiaz, Siam, Mennatullah, Sigal, Leonid, Little, James J.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Hossain, Mir Rayat Imtiaz
Siam, Mennatullah
Sigal, Leonid
Little, James J.
author_facet Hossain, Mir Rayat Imtiaz
Siam, Mennatullah
Sigal, Leonid
Little, James J.
contents Large-scale vision-language models (VLMs), trained on extensive datasets of image-text pairs, exhibit strong multimodal understanding capabilities by implicitly learning associations between textual descriptions and image regions. This emergent ability enables zero-shot object detection and segmentation, using techniques that rely on text-image attention maps, without necessarily training on abundant labeled segmentation datasets. However, performance of such methods depends heavily on prompt engineering and manually selected layers or head choices for the attention layers. In this work, we demonstrate that, rather than relying solely on textual prompts, providing a single visual example for each category and fine-tuning the text-to-image attention layers and embeddings significantly improves the performance. Additionally, we propose learning an ensemble through few-shot fine-tuning across multiple layers and/or prompts. An entropy-based ranking and selection mechanism for text-to-image attention layers is proposed to identify the top-performing layers without the need for segmentation labels. This eliminates the need for hyper-parameter selection of text-to-image attention layers, providing a more flexible and scalable solution for open-vocabulary segmentation. We show that this approach yields strong zero-shot performance, further enhanced through fine-tuning with a single visual example. Moreover, we demonstrate that our method and findings are general and can be applied across various vision-language models (VLMs).
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_10779
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle The Power of One: A Single Example is All it Takes for Segmentation in VLMs
Hossain, Mir Rayat Imtiaz
Siam, Mennatullah
Sigal, Leonid
Little, James J.
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Large-scale vision-language models (VLMs), trained on extensive datasets of image-text pairs, exhibit strong multimodal understanding capabilities by implicitly learning associations between textual descriptions and image regions. This emergent ability enables zero-shot object detection and segmentation, using techniques that rely on text-image attention maps, without necessarily training on abundant labeled segmentation datasets. However, performance of such methods depends heavily on prompt engineering and manually selected layers or head choices for the attention layers. In this work, we demonstrate that, rather than relying solely on textual prompts, providing a single visual example for each category and fine-tuning the text-to-image attention layers and embeddings significantly improves the performance. Additionally, we propose learning an ensemble through few-shot fine-tuning across multiple layers and/or prompts. An entropy-based ranking and selection mechanism for text-to-image attention layers is proposed to identify the top-performing layers without the need for segmentation labels. This eliminates the need for hyper-parameter selection of text-to-image attention layers, providing a more flexible and scalable solution for open-vocabulary segmentation. We show that this approach yields strong zero-shot performance, further enhanced through fine-tuning with a single visual example. Moreover, we demonstrate that our method and findings are general and can be applied across various vision-language models (VLMs).
title The Power of One: A Single Example is All it Takes for Segmentation in VLMs
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.10779