Open-vocabulary semantic segmentation (OVSS) relies on vision-language alignment to recognize arbitrary text-defined categories, yet this alignment is fragile under continual test-time distribution shift. Our diagnostic analysis reveals that entropy minimization drives patch-level class collapse, continual updates erode vision-language alignment, and redundant gradients from low-shift samples waste computation. We propose Diversify, Anchor, and Filter (DAF), a stabilization framework that augments entropy-based adaptation with a marginal diversity loss that resists collapse, a cross-modal anchor consistency loss that constrains feature drift relative to a frozen source model, and feature salience filtering that skips low-value backward passes to offset part of the source-anchor overhead. We evaluate on five datasets spanning natural scenes, autonomous driving, underwater imagery, and remote sensing with their corrupted variants. Across the evaluated continual shifts, DAF remains stable where entropy minimization collapses, improving mIoU by over 8 points on Pascal VOC20-C, over 9 points on LoveDA, and over 3 points on Foggy Cityscapes compared to the source model, and is robust to aggressive adaptation and learning rate choices.
The integration of novel view synthesis (NVS) and open-vocabulary segmentation (OVS) has recently yielded powerful feed-forward 3D foundation models. However, their inherent reliance on static-scene assumptions leads to severe misalignment of spatial features in unconstrained dynamic environments. To bridge this critical gap, we propose SPAR, a novel joint semantic-geometric encoding architecture that explicitly isolates transient dynamic noise prior to latent space aggregation. Furthermore, we introduce a dynamic-region-aware end-to-end training paradigm that structurally couples motion estimation with multi-view visual and semantic learning. This unified approach enables the network to inherently resolve motion conflicts and distill multi-view consistent, temporally stable scene representations from dynamic inputs. Extensive experiments on the challenging D-RE10K benchmark demonstrate that SPAR achieves state-of-the-art performance. Our end-to-end approach achieves exceptional novel view synthesis quality, yielding a PSNR of 22.15 dB and 23.33 dB given only 3 and 4 input views respectively. Despite being trained in a self-supervised manner, our model achieves an mIoU of 88.5% for motion mask prediction. Furthermore, our analysis reveals a strong inter-task synergy between photometric scene reconstruction and semantic understanding, where semantic synthesis learning consistently enhances photometric fidelity in novel view rendering. Code will be available at https://github.com/dmucby/SPAR.
Vision foundation models are capable of generalizing across 3-dimensional (3D) scenes with high-fidelity estimates; their empirical success can be attributed to training on large-scale datasets of perspective images. However, when transferred to wide field-of-view (FoV) images, such as those captured by fisheye cameras, they return erroneous outputs due to a covariate shift stemming from the radial distortion on the image pixels. We propose a method to generalize vision foundation models to fisheye cameras. The crux of our method lies in a set of learnable parameters, termed Distortion Extenders (DEX), that model the fisheye distortion coefficients and the distributional shift between fisheye and perspective images encoded in the latent space. By minimizing a self-supervised alignment loss, DEX transforms the latent embeddings of fisheye images to resemble those of perspective images to recover high-fidelity estimates. DEX is architecture- and task-agnostic: We demonstrate DEX on monocular depth estimation and open-vocabulary segmentation for convolution- and Transformer-based architectures, where we consistently improve over baselines across indoor and outdoor fisheye datasets. As a byproduct, the activations of DEX can also be decoded to distortion coefficients to support camera calibration. Code available at: https://github.com/Suchisrit/DEX.
Open-vocabulary semantic segmentation (OVSS) aims to segment image regions corresponding to arbitrary text queries. Although the Segment Anything Model (SAM) is a powerful foundation model for segmentation, its standalone performance on OVSS remains limited. Existing methods therefore often use SAM to refine coarse masks predicted by other models, but this strategy is unreliable when the initial masks are inaccurate. In this work, we argue that more reliable segmentation can be achieved by exploiting SAM as a region expansion module guided by accurate object points (i.e., seeds) rather than inaccurate coarse masks. Inspired by classical seeded segmentation, we reformulate OVSS as text-guided seed localization followed by seed-based region expansion. To realize this idea, we propose Text-to-Seed (T2S), a training-free framework that leverages the text-to-region correspondence of Stable Diffusion to generate attention-based seed points for target categories described by text. These sparse seeds are then used as point prompts for SAM to produce full object masks. Without task-specific training or additional annotations, T2S achieves strong performance on standard OVSS benchmarks, demonstrating the effectiveness of combining semantic grounding with seed-driven spatial segmentation.
Extracting a target object from a pre-built 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) scene enables interactive 3D editing. Existing methods either train for tens of minutes per scene, sacrifice accuracy, or require original reconstruction cameras that pre-built assets may not include. We present Seed2GS, which achieves the highest reported LERF-MASK accuracy without original reconstruction cameras or scene-specific representation training. Its key insight is to separate target identity from 3D coverage. QD-SAM3 selects one reliable reference mask from several open-vocabulary candidates, fixing identity once. Seed lift and visibility-adaptive virtual orbits then expose the object from new viewpoints, while tracking propagates the seed without repeated detection. Because the scene remains frozen, these masks supervise only one temporary foreground logit per Gaussian. On LERF-MASK, Seed2GS reaches 92.1% mean intersection over union (mIoU) with a measured compute-only latency of 9.3 seconds, 3.7 points above the strongest scene-trained baseline and 7.6 points above the closest camera-free baseline. With one fixed test reference per scene, the complete pipeline retains 91.1% mIoU; replacing its predicted seed with a ground-truth mask improves mIoU by only 0.72 points. On 3D-OVS, Seed2GS reaches 95.7% mIoU.
This work addresses the challenge of open-vocabulary instance segmentation (OVIS) and open-set panoptic segmentation (OSPS), which aim to recognize both predefined and unseen object categories without exhaustive human annotations. Existing methods often suffer from noisy pseudo-masks, limited visual-textual grounding, and difficulty handling synonyms or out-of-vocabulary (OOV) words. To overcome these challenges, we propose a multimodal framework that leverages pre-trained vision-language models for automatic pseudo-label generation, CLIP-guided synonym filtering, and GPT-based caption reconstruction. In our target-vocabulary-assisted pseudo-labeling setting, the framework first constructs pseudo segmentation masks, descriptive captions, and semantically aligned synonym sets using Grounded SAM, LLaVA, and CLIP, providing multimodal supervision without manual annotation. We then enhance visual-textual alignment through three complementary training objectives: an extended grounding loss that incorporates visually grounded synonyms, a semantic consistency loss, and a generative caption reconstruction loss. Extensive experiments on the COCO dataset demonstrate that the proposed method consistently outperforms previous state-of-the-art approaches under this protocol, achieving substantial improvements on both OVIS and OSPS benchmarks.
Open-vocabulary remote sensing segmentation has recently emerged as a promising paradigm that enables pixel-level recognition of arbitrary categories specified by natural language, including classes unseen during training. However, geospatial domain shifts caused by heterogeneous regions, spatial resolutions, and acquisition platforms weaken visual-text matching and limit cross-dataset generalization. Recent attempts have begun to incorporate auxiliary vision foundation models (VFMs), typically coupling their features with text embeddings as additional matching evidence. However, this strategy may introduce inconsistent matching signals while leaving the structure-sensitive representations of VFMs insufficiently exploited. We therefore propose GeoSeg-OV, which decouples auxiliary VFM features from visual-text matching and repurposes them as structural guidance for cost aggregation and decoding. GeoSeg-OV constructs an orientation-robust cost volume from multi-rotation CLIP features, while a frozen VFM extracts multi-scale structure-sensitive features in parallel. We propose Structure-Guided Aggregation (SGA), which integrates cost tokens and CLIP semantic guidance with VFM-derived pairwise structural biases for coherent spatial propagation, followed by text-conditioned class-wise reasoning. We further introduce Cost-Aware Decoding (CAD) to adaptively refine and fuse multi-scale semantic and structural guidance based on the current decoder context. On the global High-Resolution Land Cover (HRLC) benchmark spanning seven datasets across six continents, GeoSeg-OV outperforms the state-of-the-art by +2.5 and +2.7 average mIoU under two training settings. A large-scale zero-shot case study further demonstrates its generalization across geographic domains and category systems without target-domain annotations or retraining.
We introduce LEGO for advanced open-vocabulary scene understanding. Beyond basic concept recognition, its core innovation lies in capturing the intrinsic semantic hierarchies within the scene, such as the "flowerpot -> bouquet -> bud -> petal" lineage. While foundation models like SAM can identify multi-granular structures in 2D, their partitions are strictly perspective-bound and lack cross-view consensus. LEGO self-adaptively re-grades volatile multi-view SAM granularities into a unified, 3D-consistent hierarchy. This provides precise supervision for the structurally coherent, multi-level segmentation of 3D scenes. By grounding these segments with CLIP embeddings, LEGO recovers open-vocabulary semantic logic across hierarchical levels. Furthermore, by incorporating spatial relationships, we elevate these segments into level-wise language scene graphs, effectively empowering Large Language Models to perform complex, context-aware spatial reasoning and precise visual grounding. Experimental results demonstrate that LEGO establishes new state-of-the-art performance across both promptable and open-vocabulary 3D segmentation benchmarks, exhibiting advanced hierarchical scene decomposition and context-aware spatial reasoning.
Open-vocabulary semantic segmentation (OVSS) repurposes a pretrained CLIP encoder for dense prediction without additional labeled supervision. Existing methods improve CLIP's spatial behavior either by redesigning its internal attention or by injecting features from auxiliary vision foundation models; both require access to the host's internal computation and are tailored to its specific forward pass. In this work, we propose Test-time Prototype Adaptation (TPA), a training-free plug-in that operates at the output level, leaving the host's forward pass and weights unmodified. By leveraging a lightweight transductive adaptation phase, TPA identifies confident anchor patches from the host's own output predictions on a small pool of unlabeled deployment-domain images, and aggregates their frozen DINO features into per-class prototypes; at inference, a single cosine similarity lookup against this frozen bank provides an auxiliary score fused linearly with the host's logits. TPA composes with five representative OVSS hosts spanning attention-redesign and VFM-injection designs, across three CLIP backbones, eight benchmarks, and multiple internal VFM choices. Under a single set of hyper-parameters and without per-host tuning or parameter updates, TPA consistently improves segmentation accuracy, with as few as approximately 10% of unlabeled deployment-domain images sufficing for effective bank construction on most benchmarks.
Rajatsubhra Chakraborty, Xujun Che, Ritabrata Chakraborty +2cs.CV
Text-to-image diffusion transformers learn about objects and scenes by learning to generate them, making them strong candidates for training-free zero-shot open-vocabulary semantic segmentation. State-of-the-art attribution methods score each pixel independently, comparing its features against a fixed text-derived class representation, whether as an output-space similarity or as a cross-attention weight. This discards structured signals the model itself exposes: the temporal structure of the generative trajectory, the visual appearance statistics of each concept, and the image's own pairwise feature geometry. We present MAVISEG, a training-free refinement layer that recovers these signals. Because its operators consume only a pixel-by-concept score field and a pixel feature space, MAVISEG is capture-agnostic rather than tied to one attribution method. Across six benchmarks it achieves the strongest overall results among training-free methods, including the best mIoU on every benchmark. Interestingly, gains are largest where the initial capture is weakest, and individual operators contribute depending on the noise in the field they refine. Our results indicate that diffusion transformers carry more concept-level information than current attribution methods recover, and that much of it is lost on the way to the mask rather than absent from the model.
Training-free open-vocabulary segmentation remains limited by a missing inference abstraction. Frozen vision-language features are produced at patch level, yet dense prediction requires a unit that simultaneously governs feature interaction, spatial support, contextual recovery, and retrieval-based correction. We present SCI-CLIP, a segment-centric inference framework built around the principle that the same region abstraction should organize all stages of dense open-vocabulary prediction. SCI-CLIP first induces a region-consistent interaction graph over frozen visual tokens, then reconstructs dense features by propagating values over this graph, augmenting them with selective cross-window support only where local evidence is insufficient. The same segment abstraction is subsequently used to construct and query an offline reference memory, aligning exemplar retrieval with the units on which prediction is made. SCI-CLIP turns frozen CLIP-style features into spatially coherent, context-aware, and retrieval-compatible dense predictions without any training. SCI-CLIP consistently improves the structural quality of dense predictions, the robustness of contextual reasoning, and the alignment of exemplar-based correction, yielding stronger open-vocabulary segmentation across eight benchmarks. Project code is available at: https://github.com/mzamini92/SCICLIP.
3D Language Gaussian Splatting embeds open-vocabulary language features into 3D Gaussian Splatting, providing an efficient explicit representation for text-driven 3D scene understanding. However, existing methods are limited to indoor or small-scale scenes, and tend to fail in Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) outdoor scenes, where severe occlusions and long distance viewpoints often lead to incorrect semantic activations and missing target responses. In this paper, we present OutLangSplat which adapts language Gaussian representations to UAV outdoor scenes by improving feature representation and aggregation reliability. For the feature representation, a 2D-3D dual-branch representation with region-based alignment and fusion is designed to improve spatial consistency, reducing incomplete target responses and background misactivations. For the feature aggregation, we introduce a training-free contribution and consistency-aware Gaussian feature aggregation strategy that leverages pixel contribution reliability and cross-view semantic consistency to suppress unreliable responses from noisy viewpoints. A new dataset is provided by manually annotating various objects on four real-world public UAV outdoor scene datasets. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first accessible dataset of open-vocabulary 3D scene understanding for UAV outdoor scenes. Quantitative evaluations and ablation studies demonstrate that OutLangSplat outperforms SOTA methods on both open-vocabulary semantic segmentation and instance localization tasks. The datasets and codes will be open-sourced.
Training-free open-vocabulary semantic segmentation (OVSS) partitions an image into semantically distinct regions based on arbitrary text descriptions, without learning any additional parameters. However, existing methods typically focus on improving visual representations while treating text embeddings that encode only generic category concepts as fixed classification references. The resulting semantic gap between these generic concepts and the visual representations that capture the specific appearances of target instances often causes incomplete masks and erroneous predictions in non-target regions. Inspired by the symbol-percept correspondence underlying perceptual anchoring, we propose Prototype-Guided Text Calibration (PTC) for training-free OVSS. In the Perceiving stage, PTC selects reliable visual evidence based on initial matching scores to construct category-specific visual prototypes. In the Anchoring stage, PTC uses these prototypes to calibrate their corresponding text embeddings, with the calibration strength adaptively adjusted based on the amount of visual evidence. Consequently, the calibrated text embeddings align more accurately with instance-specific visual representations while preserving generic category semantics and open-vocabulary generalization. Moreover, PTC requires neither additional training nor external models and can serve as a plug-and-play module for existing methods. Extensive experiments across eight benchmarks show that PTC significantly enhances the performance of six representative methods and yields more complete and accurate segmentation results. These results validate PTC as a simple and effective approach to improving visual-text alignment.
Remote sensing semantic segmentation is hindered by costly pixel-level annotations, motivating training-free open-vocabulary methods. Recently, the recent release of DINOv3 brings DINO.txt, which equips the standalone DINO backbone with image-text contrastive learning and thus opens up the possibility of open-vocabulary segmentation. We propose DinoSplat-OV, a training-free framework that adapts DINOv3 to remote sensing without fine-tuning or additional pretraining. Targeting the dense distribution, multi-scale nature, and large size of remote sensing imagery, we design two core modules. Its Text-aware Laplacian Propagation module de-noises patch-level predictions by combining textual semantic affinities with local visual similarity, improving regional consistency while preserving boundaries. Its Gaussian Splatting Upsampling module reconstructs pixel-level features through RGB-guided anisotropic aggregation and test-time optimization. A global-anchor sliding-window strategy further supports large-scale imagery. Experiments on UDD5, DOTA, and LoveDA demonstrate competitive or superior performance over existing training-free methods, effectively filling the gap of DINO-series models in training-free open-vocabulary segmentation and providing a viable new path for further advances in this direction.
Open-vocabulary segmentation identifies and segments objects from arbitrary textual descriptions. SAM 3 supports noun-phrase-guided segmentation and achieves competitive open-vocabulary performance through exhaustive vocabulary traversal, yet suffers from prohibitive computational overhead as target categories scale. In this paper, we propose an Efficient Open-Vocabulary segmentation framework with SAM 3 (EOVSAM), which adapts SAM 3 for single-pass prediction. EOVSAM removes prompt conditioning to turn SAM 3 into an efficient mask generator and introduces a new Attentional Aggregation strategy to optimize open-vocabulary classification end-to-end. This formulation avoids the multi-stage pipelines and post-processing heuristics commonly used by existing methods, while mitigating the closed-set collapse that can arise when classification is optimized directly. EOVSAM consistently improves segmentation accuracy over vanilla SAM 3 on all evaluated datasets and accelerates inference by up to 338$\times$. Furthermore, EOVSAM maintains high accuracy at lower resolutions while achieving even more remarkable inference speeds. Experiments on standard semantic and panoptic segmentation benchmarks show that EOVSAM combines competitive or state-of-the-art accuracy with a substantial speed advantage over existing open-vocabulary segmentation models. Code and models are available at https://github.com/hustvl/EOVSAM.
Open-vocabulary segmentation labels arbitrary categories from a text query without per-class training, yet on remote sensing imagery it underperforms on categories it handles reliably elsewhere. We find that much of this gap traces to the text query rather than to the segmentation model. Because these models are not specialized for overhead imagery, the class name that serves as the query is often a weak address into the vision-language embedding space. We show that a better name repairs part of the gap, while the remaining failures call for an address that the tested natural-language rephrasings do not provide. We recover that address from a few examples through textual inversion on a frozen model, keeping inference text only. On a representative benchmark this raises the mean intersection over union on the affected categories from 3.9 to 39.4, and across eight remote sensing datasets it improves over few-shot methods that instead inject visual prompts at inference.
Open-vocabulary semantic segmentation (OVSS) leverages textual semantics to segment objects beyond predefined categories. While the self-supervised model DINOv3 provides strong structured visual representations, its lack of native textual alignment hinders its direct application to OVSS. To bridge this gap, we propose DINOde, an ODE-based framework that continuously aligns CLIP text embeddings with the DINO visual manifold. Our approach employs two complementary components: (i) Semantic Text Flow (STF), which evolves text embeddings toward the DINO manifold through a continuous ODE trajectory, and (ii) Global Context Flow (GCF), which progressively refines the holistic image representation carried by DINO's CLS token. To preserve the hyperspherical geometry of the feature space during this evolution, we further introduce Velocity Tangent Projection, which constrains the learned velocity field to the tangent space. By modeling alignment as a continuous trajectory, DINOde avoids the manifold entanglement inherent in discrete MLP projections and yields more robust cross-modal alignment. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DINOde consistently outperforms existing methods and achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple OVSS benchmarks. The code is available at https://github.com/yoon307/DINOde.
Generalized few-shot 3D point-cloud segmentation (GFS-PCS) asks a model to segment a scene into many base classes seen at training time and a set of novel classes. The state of the art reaches novel classes by reconciling a dense but noisy 3D vision-language prior with the few-shot support, but it pays for this with base 3D labels, per-episode training, and the support annotations themselves. We ask how far the same reconciliation can go with none of these: no training, no 3D labels, and not even the few-shot support. We pair a frozen 3D vision-language model (RegionPLC) as a dense prior with a frozen promptable concept segmenter (SAM3), prompted by the bare novel class names and lifted from posed RGB views, and reconcile the two by cross-view consistency: a point becomes novel only when enough of the views that see it agree. On the ScanNet200 GFS-PCS benchmark this fully training-free, open-vocabulary pipeline improves novel mIoU by +2.6 over the training-free dense prior while holding base accuracy within 0.5, and recovers a third (33%) of the novel-class gap to the trained state of the art that uses far more supervision. We further show that injecting the few-shot support into the pipeline, as a fusion gate and as a prototypical dense classifier, adds nothing over consistency alone and in fact degrades it through the classifier, which is why the method needs no support at all. On the harder ScanNet++ benchmark, where the dense prior is far weaker on novel classes, the same pipeline nearly doubles novel mIoU (+15.7, from 16.2 to 31.9) at a 1.7 base cost, lifting the harmonic mean from 21.5 to 31.1
Visual Language Navigation (VLN) aims to enable an embodied agent to navigate complex environments by following natural language instructions. Recent approaches build semantic spatial maps and leverage Large Language Models (LLMs) for reasoning and decision making. Despite these advances, existing systems lack instance-level object detail and robustness to diverse user queries, limiting reliable navigation in complex indoor environments. To address these limitations, we propose Instance-Enriched Semantic Maps, a unified framework with three key contributions: (1) Instance-level two-and-a-half-dimensional (2.5D) rich information mapping that constructs maps from color and depth observations via open-vocabulary panoptic segmentation, preserving vertical distinctions and capturing small objects, while storing diverse semantic attributes and natural language captions enriched with room-level context. (2) Robust query processing via LLM-based target selection, which dynamically routes queries across type-specialized experts and integrates their outputs through score-level fusion, enabling consistent goal selection across diverse query formulations. (3) Storage-efficient semantic representation that achieves approximately 96% reduction compared to three-dimensional (3D) scene-graph approaches while preserving sufficient spatial information for navigation. The proposed 2.5D representation outperforms the 3D baseline by over 27% in prediction-normalized Area Under the Curve (AUC). In navigation experiments, our method achieves over 17% improvement in object retrieval and over 23% in navigation success compared to the baseline across diverse query types. The project page is available at https://rcilab.github.io/iesm_vln.
Referring Image Segmentation (RIS) aims to segment image regions specified by natural language, enabling fine-grained and controllable visual understanding. Extending RIS to endoscopic imagery, however, presents unique challenges, including scarce high-quality annotations and complex, domain-specific image-text relationships. Although recent vision-language models demonstrate strong cross-domain alignment, they often fail to capture fine-grained textual cues in endoscopic settings, resulting in suboptimal performance and limited generalization. To address these challenges, we introduce ReferEndoscopy, a large-scale benchmark for RIS in the endoscopy field. Building on this dataset, we propose the Attribute Retrieval-based Endoscopic-RIS (AR-ERIS) framework for open-vocabulary endoscopic compositional referring segmentation. AR-ERIS leverages attribute retrieval for open-vocabulary endoscopic compositional referring segmentation and is pretrained on the curated ReferEndoscopy dataset, achieving state-of-the-art performance with strong generalization across both simulated and real-world endoscopic data. The dataset and code will be publicly released upon completion of the review process.
Comprehensive 3D scene understanding from sparse, unposed images requires a model to recover renderable geometry, open-vocabulary semantics, and free/occupied 3D space without relying on external camera calibration. Recent feed-forward Gaussian methods improve pose-free reconstruction and semantic rendering, but their Gaussian primitives are mainly optimized through image-space objectives and remain weakly constrained in unobserved regions. We propose \textit{COVScene}, a pose-free semantic Gaussian framework that couples renderable Gaussian primitives with a dense semantic occupancy field through differentiable volumetric lifting. Instead of converting Gaussians to voxels only at evaluation time, COVScene lifts the predicted semantic Gaussians inside the training computation graph, so volumetric regularization provides gradients to Gaussian opacity, geometry, and semantic features. The framework combines a semantic-aware Geometry Transformer, multi-task Gaussian decoding, geometric foundation distillation, and occupancy entropy regularization to support novel view synthesis, open-vocabulary semantic querying, and semantic occupancy prediction within a single representation. Experiments on ScanNet and ScanNet++ show that COVScene maintains competitive rendering quality, improves open-vocabulary segmentation, and achieves stronger semantic occupancy prediction than the self-supervised baseline without direct voxel-level supervision.
3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has emerged at the forefront of 3D scene reconstruction. Extending 3DGS with language-driven, open-vocabulary understanding has gained significant attention for real-world applications such as embodied AI. Recent methods achieve this by learning an instance feature attribute and assigning semantics by distilling high-dimensional Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining (CLIP) features directly into the scene representation. However, the instance grouping mechanisms of these methods either require a predefined number of instances or suffer from noise in their bottom-up grouping strategies. Furthermore, the reliance on CLIP restricts semantic understanding to simple noun phrases, preventing complex spatial reasoning and referential expression grounding. We present GaussDet, a method that circumvents the need for dense CLIP features by leveraging discrete, open-vocabulary 2D object detectors with referring expression capabilities. We learn instance features for individual Gaussians to decompose the scene into 3D instance groups. By rendering these groups and aggregating semantic votes from multi-view 2D detections, we generate a robust View-Aggregated Semantic Label Distribution (VASD) for each 3D instance. This view-aggregation strategy acts as a strong regularizer, attenuating spurious labels caused by low-quality instance grouping. Our approach enables a straightforward, zero-shot extension from simple language queries to complex referential grounding. Extensive evaluations across two key tasks -- open-vocabulary segmentation (LeRF-OVS, ScanNet) and referring expression grounding (Ref-LeRF) -- demonstrate that GaussDet achieves consistent improvements over existing methods. Most notably, we achieve a substantial 16.7% mIoU improvement in referential grounding within a strict zero-shot setting.
3D Gaussian Splatting~(3DGS) has emerged as a promising paradigm for reconstructing streamable free-viewpoint video~(FVV) from multi-view videos. However, 3DGS-based FVVs typically lack user interaction and editing capabilities, which diminishes the immersive experience. Recent research has integrated language features from CLIP into 3DGS via distillation, enabling open-vocabulary queries and supporting many downstream applications. Nevertheless, the stringent requirements of FVV, low frame size and high FPS, make current language Gaussian representations unsuitable for language-embedded FVV. In this paper, we propose DLGStream, a novel language-embedded FVV representation that streams time-varying language features alongside Gaussian attributes to support 4D environment interaction, scene editing, and spatial intelligence. Specifically, we propose a dual-opacity dynamic language Gaussian representation, which maintains two opacity attributes for color and language features to deal with performance degradation that occurs when colors and features are jointly optimized. Furthermore, we introduce an interpolation-based deformation field to reduce temporal redundancy. This deformation field can also be used for 4D frame interpolation, boosting FVV sequences from low to high FPS. Experimental results demonstrate that DLGStream achieves superior performance in both on open-vocabulary segmentation and reconstruction quality with an average frame size of merely 43 KB. The code is available on \href{https://github.com/kkkzh/DLGStream}{https://github.com/kkkzh/DLGStream}.
Open-vocabulary semantic segmentation (OVSS) enables text-guided segmentation of unseen objects, breaking fixed-class limitations to achieve open-world understanding. However, existing OVSS methods primarily focus on modifying the CLIP attention mechanism, which still suffers from unstable local segmentation for remote sensing (RS) domain. To address these limitations, we propose RSGPNet, a training-free geometric prompting framework for RS OVSS that refines segmentation by leveraging object geometric areas and consistency constraints. Specifically, RSGPNet comprises three core modules: a Text-guided Coarse Mask module (TCM), a Geometric Re-prompting Module (GRP), and a Coarse-to-fine Consistency Verification Mechanism (CVM). TCM utilizes text prompts and the input image to construct initial coarse segmentation masks. GRP then converts these coarse masks into geometric box prompts, feeding them back into the segmentation model to generate refined masks. Finally, CVM employs consistency computation to prevent prompting from reinforcing erroneous regions. They allow the model to improve segmentation accuracy in complex areas, such as category boundaries. Extensive experiments on RS datasets demonstrate that RSGPNet significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods across both quantitative and qualitative metrics while exhibiting excellent interpretability. The code is released at \href{https://github.com/wangshanwen001/RSGPNet}{https://github.com/wangshanwen001/RSGPNet}.
Segment Anything Model 3 (SAM 3) provides a strong frozen backbone for concept-prompted segmentation, but applying it directly to open-vocabulary semantic segmentation (OVSS) is inefficient: full-resolution decoding is typically run over the entire dataset vocabulary, whereas each image contains only a small active subset of classes. We introduce ActiveSAM, a training-free, zero-shot inference framework that turns SAM 3 into an active-vocabulary segmenter. ActiveSAM first canonicalizes and expands class prompts, then estimates an image-conditioned active set from a low-resolution presence preview. Only the retained classes are decoded at full resolution, using bucketed prompt multiplexing with the frozen SAM 3 decoder. The preview stage uses only class-presence evidence and skips unnecessary segmentation-head computation, while the final stage applies margin-aware background calibration to suppress low-confidence pixels. ActiveSAM requires no target-dataset training, no weight updates, and no oracle class-presence labels. Across eight OVSS benchmarks, ActiveSAM improves the speed-accuracy tradeoff of training-free open-vocabulary semantic segmentation, outperforming the current state-of-the-art SegEarth-OV3 by approximately +1.4 mIoU on average while running up to 5.5x faster on large-vocabulary datasets. ActiveSAM also demonstrates the strongest robustness under image corruption that simulates real-world distribution shift, making it well-suited for deployment in noisy-input domains such as autonomous driving and embodied AI. Code is available at https://github.com/VILA-Lab/ActiveSAM.
Accurate 3D instance segmentation in point cloud data is critical for machine vision applications. Recent advancements leverage multiple pre-trained foundation models to generate 3D proposals, followed by the application of proposal aggregation methods, which significantly enhance performance. However, they often produce sub-optimal results due to inherent variations in confidence levels across different segmentation models, resulting in a bias toward the model with higher confidence. This bias is inherently model-dependent and is influenced by factors such as data preprocessing techniques and training strategies. To address this bias, we propose a novel, training-free 3D instance segmentation approach via Geometric Visual Correspondence (GVC-Seg), which exploits the correspondence between 3D geometric cues and 2D visual cues to mitigate the confidence bias. Additionally, a 3D proposal generation module and a mask-aware CLIP feature extraction module are introduced during the instance mask generation and instance semantic reasoning, respectively. In this way, GVC-Seg enhances proposal quality assessment, ensuring unbiased ensemble learning across different models. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on several challenging benchmarks, while also exhibiting strong potential in open-vocabulary semantic segmentation settings.
Semantic image segmentation assigns a predefined category label to each pixel, has achieved significant progress lately. Open-Vocabulary Segmentation (OVS) extends the segmentation task from a fixed set to an open set, enabling the identification and segmentation of novel concepts based on arbitrary text inputs, such as category names or descriptions. In this paper, we propose a novel Semantic Calibration Network (SCN) for open-vocabulary semantic segmentation. Different from prior approaches that focus on feature aggregation or simple fine-tuning of pre-trained models, SCN refines the mask classification process by explicitly modeling the semantic correlations between classes, aiming to enhance the model's discriminative power while effectively preserving the generalization abilities of the pre-trained CLIP model. Specifically, SCN comprises two core components: Class Disambiguation (CD) and Logits Fusion (LF). First, a cross-attention mechanism is utilized to transform the text embeddings into visually aware pseudo-text embeddings, in order to derive an enhanced similarity score that complements the original mask-text similarity score. Subsequently, the Class Disambiguation module captures implicit inter-class dependencies through a residual architecture to effectively resolve semantic ambiguities. Finally, the Logits Fusion module dynamically integrates multifaceted semantic evidence to ensure that the model achieves a robust semantic consensus while maintaining CLIP's inherent generalization capability. Comprehensive experimental results on mainstream benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed method achieves significant performance improvements compared to state-of-the-art algorithms.
Tunnel inspection requires outputs that can support defect localization, measurement, severity grading, and engineering documentation. Existing training-free foundation-model pipelines usually stop at coarse open-vocabulary proposals, which are difficult to use directly in interference-heavy tunnel scenes. We propose a training-free framework TunnelMIND. Specifically, language-guided defect proposals are not treated as final outputs; instead, their spatial support is recalibrated at inference time through dense visual consistency, so that coarse semantic anchors can be transformed into more reliable prompts under tunnel-specific hard negatives. The resulting masks are further reconstructed into structured defect entities with category, location, geometry, severity, and context attributes, which are then mapped to retrieval-grounded explanation and engineering-readable report generation under expert knowledge constraints. On visible, GPR, and road defect tasks, TunnelMIND achieves F1 scores of 0.68, 0.78, and 0.72, respectively. Overall, TunnelMIND shows that training-free tunnel inspection can move beyond coarse localization toward structured defect evidence for engineering assessment.
Open-vocabulary semantic segmentation (OVSS) in remote sensing images is a promising task that employs textual descriptions for identifying undefined land cover categories. Despite notable advances, existing methods typically employ a static inference paradigm, overlooking the distinct distribution of each scene, resulting in semantic ambiguity in diverse land covers and incomplete foreground activation. Motivated by this, we propose Seeking Consensus, termed SeeCo, a plug-and-play framework to boost the performance of training-free OVSS models in remote sensing images, which recalibrates arbitrary OVSS models on-the-fly by seeking dual consensus: geometric consensus learning (GCL) through multi-view consistent observations and semantic consensus learning (SCL) via textual description adaptive calibration, which assists collaborative recalibration of visual and textual semantics. The two consensus are injected via an online consensus injector (OCI), effectively alleviating the under-activation and semantic bias. SeeCo requires no specific training process, yet recalibrates semantic-geometric alignment for each unique scene during inference. Extensive experiments on eight remote sensing OVSS benchmarks show consistent gains, proving its effectiveness and universality.
Diffusion models are primarily trained for image synthesis, yet their denoising trajectories encode rich, spatially aligned visual priors. In this paper, we demonstrate that these priors can be utilized for text-conditioned semantic and open-vocabulary segmentation, and this approach can be generalized to various downstream tasks to make a general-purpose diffusion segmentation framework. Concretely, we introduce DiGSeg (Diffusion Models as a Generalist Segmentation Learner), which repurposes a pretrained diffusion model into a unified segmentation framework. Our approach encodes the input image and ground-truth mask into the latent space and concatenates them as conditioning signals for the diffusion U-Net. A parallel CLIP-aligned text pathway injects language features across multiple scales, enabling the model to align textual queries with evolving visual representations. This design transforms an off-the-shelf diffusion backbone into a universal interface that produces structured segmentation masks conditioned on both appearance and arbitrary text prompts. Extensive experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on standard semantic segmentation benchmarks, as well as strong open-vocabulary generalization and cross-domain transfer to medical, remote sensing, and agricultural scenarios-without domain-specific architectural customization. These results indicate that modern diffusion backbones can serve as generalist segmentation learners rather than pure generators, narrowing the gap between visual generation and visual understanding.