Beyond Labels: Zero-Shot Diabetic Foot Ulcer Wound Segmentation with Self-attention Diffusion Models and the Potential for Text-Guided Customization

Diabetic foot ulcers (DFUs) pose a significant challenge in healthcare, requiring precise and efficient wound assessment to enhance patient outcomes. This study introduces the Attention Diffusion Zero-shot Unsupervised System (ADZUS), a novel text-guided diffusion model that performs wound segmentation without relying on labeled training data. Unlike conventional deep learning models, which require extensive annotation, ADZUS leverages zero-shot learning to dynamically adapt segmentation based on descriptive prompts, offering enhanced flexibility and adaptability in clinical applications. Experimental evaluations demonstrate that ADZUS surpasses traditional and state-of-the-art segmentation models, achieving an IoU of 86.68\% and the highest precision of 94.69\% on the chronic wound dataset, outperforming supervised approaches such as FUSegNet. Further validation on a custom-curated DFU dataset reinforces its robustness, with ADZUS achieving a median DSC of 75\%, significantly surpassing FUSegNet's 45\%. The model's text-guided segmentation capability enables real-time customization of segmentation outputs, allowing targeted analysis of wound characteristics based on clinical descriptions. Despite its competitive performance, the computational cost of diffusion-based inference and the need for potential fine-tuning remain areas for future improvement. ADZUS represents a transformative step in wound segmentation, providing a scalable, efficient, and adaptable AI-driven solution for medical imaging.

Tokenization Matters: Improving Zero-Shot NER for Indic Languages

Tokenization is a critical component of Natural Language Processing (NLP), especially for low resource languages, where subword segmentation influences vocabulary structure and downstream task accuracy. Although Byte Pair Encoding (BPE) is a standard tokenization method in multilingual language models, its suitability for Named Entity Recognition (NER) in low resource Indic languages remains underexplored due to its limitations in handling morphological complexity. In this work, we systematically compare BPE, SentencePiece, and Character Level tokenization strategies using IndicBERT for NER tasks in low resource Indic languages like Assamese, Bengali, Marathi, and Odia, as well as extremely low resource Indic languages like Santali, Manipuri, and Sindhi. We assess both intrinsic linguistic properties tokenization efficiency, out of vocabulary (OOV) rates, and morphological preservation as well as extrinsic downstream performance, including fine tuning and zero shot cross lingual transfer. Our experiments show that SentencePiece is a consistently better performing approach than BPE for NER in low resource Indic Languages, particularly in zero shot cross lingual settings, as it better preserves entity consistency. While BPE provides the most compact tokenization form, it is not capable of generalization because it misclassifies or even fails to recognize entity labels when tested on unseen languages. In contrast, SentencePiece constitutes a better linguistic structural preservation model, benefiting extremely low resource and morphologically rich Indic languages, such as Santali and Manipuri, for superior entity recognition, as well as high generalization across scripts, such as Sindhi, written in Arabic. The results point to SentencePiece as the more effective tokenization strategy for NER within multilingual and low resource Indic NLP applications.

LGD: Leveraging Generative Descriptions for Zero-Shot Referring Image Segmentation

Zero-shot referring image segmentation aims to locate and segment the target region based on a referring expression, with the primary challenge of aligning and matching semantics across visual and textual modalities without training. Previous works address this challenge by utilizing Vision-Language Models and mask proposal networks for region-text matching. However, this paradigm may lead to incorrect target localization due to the inherent ambiguity and diversity of free-form referring expressions. To alleviate this issue, we present LGD (Leveraging Generative Descriptions), a framework that utilizes the advanced language generation capabilities of Multi-Modal Large Language Models to enhance region-text matching performance in Vision-Language Models. Specifically, we first design two kinds of prompts, the attribute prompt and the surrounding prompt, to guide the Multi-Modal Large Language Models in generating descriptions related to the crucial attributes of the referent object and the details of surrounding objects, referred to as attribute description and surrounding description, respectively. Secondly, three visual-text matching scores are introduced to evaluate the similarity between instance-level visual features and textual features, which determines the mask most associated with the referring expression. The proposed method achieves new state-of-the-art performance on three public datasets RefCOCO, RefCOCO+ and RefCOCOg, with maximum improvements of 9.97% in oIoU and 11.29% in mIoU compared to previous methods.

NVSMask3D: Hard Visual Prompting with Camera Pose Interpolation for 3D Open Vocabulary Instance Segmentation

Vision-language models (VLMs) have demonstrated impressive zero-shot transfer capabilities in image-level visual perception tasks. However, they fall short in 3D instance-level segmentation tasks that require accurate localization and recognition of individual objects. To bridge this gap, we introduce a novel 3D Gaussian Splatting based hard visual prompting approach that leverages camera interpolation to generate diverse viewpoints around target objects without any 2D-3D optimization or fine-tuning. Our method simulates realistic 3D perspectives, effectively augmenting existing hard visual prompts by enforcing geometric consistency across viewpoints. This training-free strategy seamlessly integrates with prior hard visual prompts, enriching object-descriptive features and enabling VLMs to achieve more robust and accurate 3D instance segmentation in diverse 3D scenes.

A Hierarchical Framework for Measuring Scientific Paper Innovation via Large Language Models

Measuring scientific paper innovation is both important and challenging. Existing content-based methods often overlook the full-paper context, fail to capture the full scope of innovation, and lack generalization. We propose HSPIM, a hierarchical and training-free framework based on large language models (LLMs). It introduces a Paper-to-Sections-to-QAs decomposition to assess innovation. We segment the text by section titles and use zero-shot LLM prompting to implement section classification, question-answering (QA) augmentation, and weighted novelty scoring. The generated QA pair focuses on section-level innovation and serves as additional context to improve the LLM scoring. For each chunk, the LLM outputs a novelty score and a confidence score. We use confidence scores as weights to aggregate novelty scores into a paper-level innovation score. To further improve performance, we propose a two-layer question structure consisting of common and section-specific questions, and apply a genetic algorithm to optimize the question-prompt combinations. Comprehensive experiments on scientific conference paper datasets show that HSPIM outperforms baseline methods in effectiveness, generalization, and interpretability.

Zero-Shot Industrial Anomaly Segmentation with Image-Aware Prompt Generation

Anomaly segmentation is essential for industrial quality, maintenance, and stability. Existing text-guided zero-shot anomaly segmentation models are effective but rely on fixed prompts, limiting adaptability in diverse industrial scenarios. This highlights the need for flexible, context-aware prompting strategies. We propose Image-Aware Prompt Anomaly Segmentation (IAP-AS), which enhances anomaly segmentation by generating dynamic, context-aware prompts using an image tagging model and a large language model (LLM). IAP-AS extracts object attributes from images to generate context-aware prompts, improving adaptability and generalization in dynamic and unstructured industrial environments. In our experiments, IAP-AS improves the F1-max metric by up to 10%, demonstrating superior adaptability and generalization. It provides a scalable solution for anomaly segmentation across industries

Med-2D SegNet: A Light Weight Deep Neural Network for Medical 2D Image Segmentation

Accurate and efficient medical image segmentation is crucial for advancing clinical diagnostics and surgical planning, yet remains a complex challenge due to the variability in anatomical structures and the demand for low-complexity models. In this paper, we introduced Med-2D SegNet, a novel and highly efficient segmentation architecture that delivers outstanding accuracy while maintaining a minimal computational footprint. Med-2D SegNet achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple benchmark datasets, including KVASIR-SEG, PH2, EndoVis, and GLAS, with an average Dice similarity coefficient (DSC) of 89.77% across 20 diverse datasets. Central to its success is the compact Med Block, a specialized encoder design that incorporates dimension expansion and parameter reduction, enabling precise feature extraction while keeping model parameters to a low count of just 2.07 million. Med-2D SegNet excels in cross-dataset generalization, particularly in polyp segmentation, where it was trained on KVASIR-SEG and showed strong performance on unseen datasets, demonstrating its robustness in zero-shot learning scenarios, even though we acknowledge that further improvements are possible. With top-tier performance in both binary and multi-class segmentation, Med-2D SegNet redefines the balance between accuracy and efficiency, setting a new benchmark for medical image analysis. This work paves the way for developing accessible, high-performance diagnostic tools suitable for clinical environments and resource-constrained settings, making it a step forward in the democratization of advanced medical technology.

Segment Any Crack: Deep Semantic Segmentation Adaptation for Crack Detection

Image-based crack detection algorithms are increasingly in demand in infrastructure monitoring, as early detection of cracks is of paramount importance for timely maintenance planning. While deep learning has significantly advanced crack detection algorithms, existing models often require extensive labeled datasets and high computational costs for fine-tuning, limiting their adaptability across diverse conditions. This study introduces an efficient selective fine-tuning strategy, focusing on tuning normalization components, to enhance the adaptability of segmentation models for crack detection. The proposed method is applied to the Segment Anything Model (SAM) and five well-established segmentation models. Experimental results demonstrate that selective fine-tuning of only normalization parameters outperforms full fine-tuning and other common fine-tuning techniques in both performance and computational efficiency, while improving generalization. The proposed approach yields a SAM-based model, Segment Any Crack (SAC), achieving a 61.22\% F1-score and 44.13\% IoU on the OmniCrack30k benchmark dataset, along with the highest performance across three zero-shot datasets and the lowest standard deviation. The results highlight the effectiveness of the adaptation approach in improving segmentation accuracy while significantly reducing computational overhead.

3D-PointZshotS: Geometry-Aware 3D Point Cloud Zero-Shot Semantic Segmentation Narrowing the Visual-Semantic Gap

Existing zero-shot 3D point cloud segmentation methods often struggle with limited transferability from seen classes to unseen classes and from semantic to visual space. To alleviate this, we introduce 3D-PointZshotS, a geometry-aware zero-shot segmentation framework that enhances both feature generation and alignment using latent geometric prototypes (LGPs). Specifically, we integrate LGPs into a generator via a cross-attention mechanism, enriching semantic features with fine-grained geometric details. To further enhance stability and generalization, we introduce a self-consistency loss, which enforces feature robustness against point-wise perturbations. Additionally, we re-represent visual and semantic features in a shared space, bridging the semantic-visual gap and facilitating knowledge transfer to unseen classes. Experiments on three real-world datasets, namely ScanNet, SemanticKITTI, and S3DIS, demonstrate that our method achieves superior performance over four baselines in terms of harmonic mIoU. The code is available at \href{https://github.com/LexieYang/3D-PointZshotS}{Github}.

Exploring Generalizable Pre-training for Real-world Change Detection via Geometric Estimation

As an essential procedure in earth observation system, change detection (CD) aims to reveal the spatial-temporal evolution of the observation regions. A key prerequisite for existing change detection algorithms is aligned geo-references between multi-temporal images by fine-grained registration. However, in the majority of real-world scenarios, a prior manual registration is required between the original images, which significantly increases the complexity of the CD workflow. In this paper, we proposed a self-supervision motivated CD framework with geometric estimation, called "MatchCD". Specifically, the proposed MatchCD framework utilizes the zero-shot capability to optimize the encoder with self-supervised contrastive representation, which is reused in the downstream image registration and change detection to simultaneously handle the bi-temporal unalignment and object change issues. Moreover, unlike the conventional change detection requiring segmenting the full-frame image into small patches, our MatchCD framework can directly process the original large-scale image (e.g., 6K*4K resolutions) with promising performance. The performance in multiple complex scenarios with significant geometric distortion demonstrates the effectiveness of our proposed framework.