Pith. sign in

REVIEW 6 cited by

Ref-Diff: Zero-shot Referring Image Segmentation with Generative Models

Not yet reviewed by Pith; the record is open.

This paper has not been read by Pith yet. Machine review is queued; the pith claim, tier, and objections will appear here once it completes.

SPECIMEN: schema-true, not a live event

T0 review · schema-true

One-sentence machine reading of the paper's core claim.

pith:XXXXXXXX · record.json · timestamp

arxiv 2308.16777 v2 pith:P56GJR4C submitted 2023-08-31 cs.CV

Ref-Diff: Zero-shot Referring Image Segmentation with Generative Models

classification cs.CV
keywords modelsgenerativereferringref-diffsegmentationtaskdiscriminativezero-shot
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
0 comments
Share X Bluesky LinkedIn Reddit HN
read the original abstract

Zero-shot referring image segmentation is a challenging task because it aims to find an instance segmentation mask based on the given referring descriptions, without training on this type of paired data. Current zero-shot methods mainly focus on using pre-trained discriminative models (e.g., CLIP). However, we have observed that generative models (e.g., Stable Diffusion) have potentially understood the relationships between various visual elements and text descriptions, which are rarely investigated in this task. In this work, we introduce a novel Referring Diffusional segmentor (Ref-Diff) for this task, which leverages the fine-grained multi-modal information from generative models. We demonstrate that without a proposal generator, a generative model alone can achieve comparable performance to existing SOTA weakly-supervised models. When we combine both generative and discriminative models, our Ref-Diff outperforms these competing methods by a significant margin. This indicates that generative models are also beneficial for this task and can complement discriminative models for better referring segmentation. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/kodenii/Ref-Diff.

discussion (0)

Sign in with ORCID, Apple, or X to comment. Anyone can read and Pith papers without signing in.

Forward citations

Cited by 6 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

  1. Vision Harnessing Agent for Open Ad-hoc Segmentation

    cs.CV 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    VASA is a vision-guided agent for open ad-hoc segmentation that creates and validates masks through planning, tool use, and error recovery, outperforming baselines on the new PARS benchmark and RefCOCOm.

  2. Tarot-SAM3: Training-free SAM3 for Any Referring Expression Segmentation

    cs.CV 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    Tarot-SAM3 delivers a training-free pipeline for segmenting images from arbitrary referring expressions via expression reasoning prompts and DINOv3-based mask self-refinement.

  3. SAM 3: Segment Anything with Concepts

    cs.CV 2025-11 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    SAM 3 introduces promptable concept segmentation that doubles accuracy of prior systems on images and videos while improving standard SAM segmentation performance.

  4. Prompting Diffusion Models for Zero-Shot Instance Segmentation

    cs.CV 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    Prompt2Seg augments diffusion models with an explicit spatial prompt conditioning branch, enabling zero-shot instance segmentation that generalizes from limited synthetic category training to diverse unseen objects an...

  5. Early Semantic Grounding in Image Editing Models for Zero-Shot Referring Image Segmentation

    cs.CV 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    Pretrained instruction-based image editing models exhibit early foreground-background separability that enables a training-free framework for zero-shot referring image segmentation using a single denoising step.

  6. Learning to Label: A Reinforced Self-Evolving Framework for Semi-supervised Referring Expression Segmentation

    cs.CV 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    A reinforced self-evolving framework (L2L) for semi-supervised referring expression segmentation that jointly optimizes the segmentation model and pseudo-labels using multimodal priors and adaptive selection.