Deterministic Mode Proposals: An Efficient Alternative to Generative Sampling for Ambiguous Segmentation

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Gerard, Sebastian, Sullivan, Josephine
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
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author Gerard, Sebastian
Sullivan, Josephine
author_facet Gerard, Sebastian
Sullivan, Josephine
contents Many segmentation tasks, such as medical image segmentation or future state prediction, are inherently ambiguous, meaning that multiple predictions are equally correct. Current methods typically rely on generative models to capture this uncertainty. However, identifying the underlying modes of the distribution with these methods is computationally expensive, requiring large numbers of samples and post-hoc clustering. In this paper, we shift the focus from stochastic sampling to the direct generation of likely outcomes. We introduce mode proposal models, a deterministic framework that efficiently produces a fixed-size set of proposal masks in a single forward pass. To handle superfluous proposals, we adapt a confidence mechanism, traditionally used in object detection, to the high-dimensional space of segmentation masks. Our approach significantly reduces inference time while achieving higher ground-truth coverage than existing generative models. Furthermore, we demonstrate that our model can be trained without knowing the full distribution of outcomes, making it applicable to real-world datasets. Finally, we show that by decomposing the velocity field of a pre-trained flow model, we can efficiently estimate prior mode probabilities for our proposals.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_20191
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Deterministic Mode Proposals: An Efficient Alternative to Generative Sampling for Ambiguous Segmentation
Gerard, Sebastian
Sullivan, Josephine
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Many segmentation tasks, such as medical image segmentation or future state prediction, are inherently ambiguous, meaning that multiple predictions are equally correct. Current methods typically rely on generative models to capture this uncertainty. However, identifying the underlying modes of the distribution with these methods is computationally expensive, requiring large numbers of samples and post-hoc clustering. In this paper, we shift the focus from stochastic sampling to the direct generation of likely outcomes. We introduce mode proposal models, a deterministic framework that efficiently produces a fixed-size set of proposal masks in a single forward pass. To handle superfluous proposals, we adapt a confidence mechanism, traditionally used in object detection, to the high-dimensional space of segmentation masks. Our approach significantly reduces inference time while achieving higher ground-truth coverage than existing generative models. Furthermore, we demonstrate that our model can be trained without knowing the full distribution of outcomes, making it applicable to real-world datasets. Finally, we show that by decomposing the velocity field of a pre-trained flow model, we can efficiently estimate prior mode probabilities for our proposals.
title Deterministic Mode Proposals: An Efficient Alternative to Generative Sampling for Ambiguous Segmentation
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.20191