Boosting Few-Shot Semantic Segmentation Via Segment Anything Model

In semantic segmentation, accurate prediction masks are crucial for downstream tasks such as medical image analysis and image editing. Due to the lack of annotated data, few-shot semantic segmentation (FSS) performs poorly in predicting masks with precise contours. Recently, we have noticed that the large foundation model segment anything model (SAM) performs well in processing detailed features. Inspired by SAM, we propose FSS-SAM to boost FSS methods by addressing the issue of inaccurate contour. The FSS-SAM is training-free. It works as a post-processing tool for any FSS methods and can improve the accuracy of predicted masks. Specifically, we use predicted masks from FSS methods to generate prompts and then use SAM to predict new masks. To avoid predicting wrong masks with SAM, we propose a prediction result selection (PRS) algorithm. The algorithm can remarkably decrease wrong predictions. Experiment results on public datasets show that our method is superior to base FSS methods in both quantitative and qualitative aspects.

Towards Precise Weakly Supervised Object Detection via Interactive Contrastive Learning of Context Information

Weakly supervised object detection (WSOD) aims at learning precise object detectors with only image-level tags. In spite of intensive research on deep learning (DL) approaches over the past few years, there is still a significant performance gap between WSOD and fully supervised object detection. In fact, most existing WSOD methods only consider the visual appearance of each region proposal but ignore employing the useful context information in the image. To this end, this paper proposes an interactive end-to-end WSDO framework called JLWSOD with two innovations: i) two types of WSOD-specific context information (i.e., instance-wise correlation andsemantic-wise correlation) are proposed and introduced into WSOD framework; ii) an interactive graph contrastive learning (iGCL) mechanism is designed to jointly optimize the visual appearance and context information for better WSOD performance. Specifically, the iGCL mechanism takes full advantage of the complementary interpretations of the WSOD, namely instance-wise detection and semantic-wise prediction tasks, forming a more comprehensive solution. Extensive experiments on the widely used PASCAL VOC and MS COCO benchmarks verify the superiority of JLWSOD over alternative state-of-the-art approaches and baseline models (improvement of 3.6%~23.3% on mAP and 3.4%~19.7% on CorLoc, respectively).

Single-Stage Broad Multi-Instance Multi-Label Learning with Diverse Inter-Correlations and its application to medical image classification

In many real-world applications, one object (e.g., image) can be represented or described by multiple instances (e.g., image patches) and simultaneously associated with multiple labels. Such applications can be formulated as multi-instance multi-label learning (MIML) problems and have been extensively studied during the past few years. Existing MIML methods are useful in many applications but most of which suffer from relatively low accuracy and training efficiency due to several issues: i) the inter-label correlations (i.e., the probabilistic correlations between the multiple labels corresponding to an object) are neglected; ii) the inter-instance correlations cannot be learned directly (or jointly) with other types of correlations due to the missing instance labels; iii) diverse inter-correlations (e.g., inter-label correlations, inter-instance correlations) can only be learned in multiple stages. To resolve these issues, a new single-stage framework called broad multi-instance multi-label learning (BMIML) is proposed. In BMIML, there are three innovative modules: i) an auto-weighted label enhancement learning (AWLEL) based on broad learning system (BLS); ii) A specific MIML neural network called scalable multi-instance probabilistic regression (SMIPR); iii) Finally, an interactive decision optimization (IDO). As a result, BMIML can achieve simultaneous learning of diverse inter-correlations between whole images, instances, and labels in single stage for higher classification accuracy and much faster training time. Experiments show that BMIML is highly competitive to (or even better than) existing methods in accuracy and much faster than most MIML methods even for large medical image data sets (> 90K images).