TALENT: Target-aware Efficient Tuning for Referring Image Segmentation

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Jin, Shuo, Yu, Siyue, Zhang, Bingfeng, Yao, Chao, Liu, Meiqin, Xiao, Jimin
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Jin, Shuo
Yu, Siyue
Zhang, Bingfeng
Yao, Chao
Liu, Meiqin
Xiao, Jimin
author_facet Jin, Shuo
Yu, Siyue
Zhang, Bingfeng
Yao, Chao
Liu, Meiqin
Xiao, Jimin
contents Referring image segmentation aims to segment specific targets based on a natural text expression. Recently, parameter-efficient tuning (PET) has emerged as a promising paradigm. However, existing PET-based methods often suffer from the fact that visual features can't emphasize the text-referred target instance but activate co-category yet unrelated objects. We analyze and quantify this problem, terming it the `non-target activation' (NTA) issue. To address this, we propose a novel framework, TALENT, which utilizes target-aware efficient tuning for PET-based RIS. Specifically, we first propose a Rectified Cost Aggregator (RCA) to efficiently aggregate text-referred features. Then, to calibrate `NTA' into accurate target activation, we adopt a Target-aware Learning Mechanism (TLM), including contextual pairwise consistency learning and target-centric contrastive learning. The former uses the sentence-level text feature to achieve a holistic understanding of the referent and constructs a text-referred affinity map to optimize the semantic association of visual features. The latter further enhances target localization to discover the distinct instance while suppressing associations with other unrelated ones. The two objectives work in concert and address `NTA' effectively. Extensive evaluations show that TALENT outperforms existing methods across various metrics (e.g., 2.5\% mIoU gains on G-Ref val set). Our codes will be released at: https://github.com/Kimsure/TALENT.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_00609
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle TALENT: Target-aware Efficient Tuning for Referring Image Segmentation
Jin, Shuo
Yu, Siyue
Zhang, Bingfeng
Yao, Chao
Liu, Meiqin
Xiao, Jimin
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Referring image segmentation aims to segment specific targets based on a natural text expression. Recently, parameter-efficient tuning (PET) has emerged as a promising paradigm. However, existing PET-based methods often suffer from the fact that visual features can't emphasize the text-referred target instance but activate co-category yet unrelated objects. We analyze and quantify this problem, terming it the `non-target activation' (NTA) issue. To address this, we propose a novel framework, TALENT, which utilizes target-aware efficient tuning for PET-based RIS. Specifically, we first propose a Rectified Cost Aggregator (RCA) to efficiently aggregate text-referred features. Then, to calibrate `NTA' into accurate target activation, we adopt a Target-aware Learning Mechanism (TLM), including contextual pairwise consistency learning and target-centric contrastive learning. The former uses the sentence-level text feature to achieve a holistic understanding of the referent and constructs a text-referred affinity map to optimize the semantic association of visual features. The latter further enhances target localization to discover the distinct instance while suppressing associations with other unrelated ones. The two objectives work in concert and address `NTA' effectively. Extensive evaluations show that TALENT outperforms existing methods across various metrics (e.g., 2.5\% mIoU gains on G-Ref val set). Our codes will be released at: https://github.com/Kimsure/TALENT.
title TALENT: Target-aware Efficient Tuning for Referring Image Segmentation
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.00609