Abstract
Fully unsupervised segmentation pipelines naively seek the most salient object, should this be present. As a result, most of the methods reported in the literature deliver non-deterministic partitions that are sensitive to initialization, seed order, and threshold heuristics. We propose PANC, a weakly supervised spectral segmentation framework that uses a minimal set of annotated visual tokens to produce stable, controllable, and reproducible object masks. From the TokenCut approach, we augment the token-token affinity graph with a handful of priors coupled to anchor nodes. By manipulating the graph topology, we bias the spectral eigenspace toward partitions that are consistent with the annotations. Our approach preserves the global grouping enforced by dense self-supervised visual features, trading annotated tokens for significant gains in reproducibility, user control, and segmentation quality. Using 5 to 30 annotations per dataset, our training-free method achieves state-of-the-art performance among weakly and unsupervised approaches on standard benchmarks (e.g., DUTS-TE, ECSSD, MS COCO). Contrarily, it excels in domains where dense labels are costly or intra-class differences are subtle. We report strong and reliable results on homogeneous, fine-grained, and texture-limited domains, achieving 96.8% (+14.43% over SotA), 78.0% (+0.2%), and 78.8% (+0.37%) average mean intersection-over-union (mIoU) on CrackForest (CFD), CUB-200-2011, and HAM10000 datasets, respectively. For multi-object benchmarks, the framework showcases explicit, user-controllable semantic segmentation.
Abstract (translated)
完全无监督的分割流程通常会寻找最显著的对象，前提是该对象存在。因此，文献中报告的大多数方法提供了非确定性的分区结果，这些结果对初始化、种子顺序和阈值启发式非常敏感。我们提出了一种弱监督光谱分割框架PANC，它使用一组最小化的注释视觉标记来生成稳定、可控且可重复的对象掩码。从TokenCut方法出发，我们在令牌-令牌亲和图中添加了一些与锚节点耦合的先验知识。通过调整图的拓扑结构，我们偏向于让光谱特征空间倾向于那些与标注一致的分区结果。我们的方法保持了由密集自监督视觉特征强制执行的整体分组效果，并以注释标记为代价换取可重复性、用户控制和分割质量方面的显著提升。 在标准基准测试（如DUTS-TE、ECSSD、MS COCO）上，使用每个数据集5到30个标注的情况下，我们的无训练方法在弱监督与完全无监督的方法中达到了最佳性能。相反，在密集标签成本高或类内差异微妙的领域，该方法表现出色。我们在同质性、细粒度和纹理有限的领域报告了强大且可靠的结果，分别实现了CrackForest (CFD)上96.8%（比最先进方法提高14.43%），CUB-200-2011上78.0%（提高0.2%）以及HAM10000数据集上的78.8%（提高0.37%）的平均交并比（mIoU）。对于多对象基准测试，该框架展示了用户可控的语义分割。
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.06912
