WOW-Seg: A Word-free Open World Segmentation Model

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Li, Danyang, Wu, Tianhao, Li, Bin, Chen, Zhenyuan, Zhang, Yang, Li, Yuxuan, Cheng, Ming-Ming, Li, Xiang
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Li, Danyang
Wu, Tianhao
Li, Bin
Chen, Zhenyuan
Zhang, Yang
Li, Yuxuan
Cheng, Ming-Ming
Li, Xiang
author_facet Li, Danyang
Wu, Tianhao
Li, Bin
Chen, Zhenyuan
Zhang, Yang
Li, Yuxuan
Cheng, Ming-Ming
Li, Xiang
contents Open world image segmentation aims to achieve precise segmentation and semantic understanding of targets within images by addressing the infinitely open set of object categories encountered in the real world. However, traditional closed-set segmentation approaches struggle to adapt to complex open world scenarios, while foundation segmentation models such as SAM exhibit notable discrepancies between their strong segmentation capabilities and relatively weaker semantic understanding. To bridge these discrepancies, we propose WOW-Seg, a Word-free Open World Segmentation model for segmenting and recognizing objects from open-set categories. Specifically, WOW-Seg introduces a novel visual prompt module, Mask2Token, which transforms image masks into visual tokens and ensures their alignment with the VLLM feature space. Moreover, we introduce the Cascade Attention Mask to decouple information across different instances. This approach mitigates inter-instance interference, leading to a significant improvement in model performance. We further construct an open world region recognition test benchmark: the Region Recognition Dataset (RR-7K). With 7,662 classes, it represents the most extensive category-rich region recognition dataset to date. WOW-Seg attains strong results on the LVIS dataset, achieving a semantic similarity of 89.7 and a semantic IoU of 82.4. This performance surpasses the previous SOTA while using only one-eighth the parameter count. These results underscore the strong open world generalization capabilities of WOW-Seg. The code and related resources are available at https://github.com/AAwcAA/WOW-Seg-Meta.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_16903
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle WOW-Seg: A Word-free Open World Segmentation Model
Li, Danyang
Wu, Tianhao
Li, Bin
Chen, Zhenyuan
Zhang, Yang
Li, Yuxuan
Cheng, Ming-Ming
Li, Xiang
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Open world image segmentation aims to achieve precise segmentation and semantic understanding of targets within images by addressing the infinitely open set of object categories encountered in the real world. However, traditional closed-set segmentation approaches struggle to adapt to complex open world scenarios, while foundation segmentation models such as SAM exhibit notable discrepancies between their strong segmentation capabilities and relatively weaker semantic understanding. To bridge these discrepancies, we propose WOW-Seg, a Word-free Open World Segmentation model for segmenting and recognizing objects from open-set categories. Specifically, WOW-Seg introduces a novel visual prompt module, Mask2Token, which transforms image masks into visual tokens and ensures their alignment with the VLLM feature space. Moreover, we introduce the Cascade Attention Mask to decouple information across different instances. This approach mitigates inter-instance interference, leading to a significant improvement in model performance. We further construct an open world region recognition test benchmark: the Region Recognition Dataset (RR-7K). With 7,662 classes, it represents the most extensive category-rich region recognition dataset to date. WOW-Seg attains strong results on the LVIS dataset, achieving a semantic similarity of 89.7 and a semantic IoU of 82.4. This performance surpasses the previous SOTA while using only one-eighth the parameter count. These results underscore the strong open world generalization capabilities of WOW-Seg. The code and related resources are available at https://github.com/AAwcAA/WOW-Seg-Meta.
title WOW-Seg: A Word-free Open World Segmentation Model
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.16903