mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Object Segmentation Without Labels with Large-Scale Generative Models

arXiv 2006.04988 ↗First posted 8 Jun 2020cs.LG cs.CV stat.MLcited by 52

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Abstract (arXiv)

The recent rise of unsupervised and self-supervised learning has dramatically reduced the dependency on labeled data, providing effective image representations for transfer to downstream vision tasks. Furthermore, recent works employed these representations in a fully unsupervised setup for image classification, reducing the need for human labels on the fine-tuning stage as well. This work demonstrates that large-scale unsupervised models can also perform a more challenging object segmentation task, requiring neither pixel-level nor image-level labeling. Namely, we show that recent unsupervised GANs allow to differentiate between foreground/background pixels, providing high-quality saliency masks. By extensive comparison on standard benchmarks, we outperform existing unsupervised alternatives for object segmentation, achieving new state-of-the-art.

Key facts. Cited by 52 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). First posted on arXiv 8 Jun 2020.

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Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2021: 3; 2022: 17; 2023: 17; 2024: 7; 2025: 6; 2026: 2.

52 papers.

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  1. 2021Label-Efficient Semantic Segmentation with Diffusion Modelscited by 495
  2. 2022Self-Supervised Transformers for Unsupervised Object Discovery using Normalized Cutcited by 166
  3. 2022Deep Spectral Methods: A Surprisingly Strong Baseline for Unsupervised Semantic Segmentation and Localizationcited by 150
  4. 2023Dataset Diffusion: Diffusion-based Synthetic Dataset Generation for Pixel-Level Semantic Segmentationcited by 112
  5. 2022TokenCut: Segmenting Objects in Images and Videos with Self-supervised Transformer and Normalized Cutcited by 111
  6. 2022Unsupervised Object Localization: Observing the Background to Discover Objectscited by 66
  7. 2023Diffusion Models for Open-Vocabulary Segmentationcited by 63
  8. 2022Unsupervised Salient Object Detection with Spectral Cluster Votingcited by 56
  9. 2023DiffusionSeg: Adapting Diffusion Towards Unsupervised Object Discoverycited by 53
  10. 2022Guess What Moves: Unsupervised Video and Image Segmentation by Anticipating Motioncited by 42
  11. 2024EmerDiff: Emerging Pixel-level Semantic Knowledge in Diffusion Modelscited by 42
  12. 2023LD-ZNet: A Latent Diffusion Approach for Text-Based Image Segmentationcited by 29
38 more
  1. 2021Unsupervised Foreground Extraction via Deep Region Competitioncited by 26
  2. 2022DeepCut: Unsupervised Segmentation using Graph Neural Networks Clusteringcited by 25
  3. 2022MOVE: Unsupervised Movable Object Segmentation and Detectioncited by 20
  4. 2021GANSeg: Learning to Segment by Unsupervised Hierarchical Image Generationcited by 19
  5. 2023MOST: Multiple Object localization with Self-supervised Transformers for object discoverycited by 17
  6. 2022Promising or Elusive? Unsupervised Object Segmentation from Real-world Single Imagescited by 16
  7. 2023Unsupervised Object Localization in the Era of Self-Supervised ViTs: A Surveycited by 16
  8. 2022Synthetic Data Supervised Salient Object Detectioncited by 15
  9. 2023Weakly-supervised Contrastive Learning for Unsupervised Object Discoverycited by 12
  10. 2025UCOD-DPL: Unsupervised Camouflaged Object Detection via Dynamic Pseudo-label Learningcited by 10
  11. 2023LOCATE: Self-supervised Object Discovery via Flow-guided Graph-cut and Bootstrapped Self-trainingcited by 8
  12. 2023PaintSeg: Training-free Segmentation via Paintingcited by 7
  13. 2022FurryGAN: High Quality Foreground-aware Image Synthesiscited by 6
  14. 2024Upsampling DINOv2 features for unsupervised vision tasks and weakly supervised materials segmentationcited by 6
  15. 2022Refine and Represent: Region-to-Object Representation Learningcited by 5
  16. 2022Extracting Semantic Knowledge from GANs with Unsupervised Learningcited by 5
  17. 2025SeeDiff: Off-the-Shelf Seeded Mask Generation from Diffusion Modelscited by 5
  18. 2022Interpreting Latent Spaces of Generative Models for Medical Images using Unsupervised Methodscited by 4
  19. 2022OAMixer: Object-aware Mixing Layer for Vision Transformerscited by 4
  20. 2023Learning Neural Eigenfunctions for Unsupervised Semantic Segmentationcited by 4
  21. 2023Unsupervised Camouflaged Object Segmentation as Domain Adaptationcited by 4
  22. 2023SEMPART: Self-supervised Multi-resolution Partitioning of Image Semanticscited by 4
  23. 2023Benchmarking and Analysis of Unsupervised Object Segmentation from Real-world Single Imagescited by 4
  24. 2024Unsupervised Object Discovery: A Comprehensive Survey and Unified Taxonomycited by 4
  25. 2025unMORE: Unsupervised Multi-Object Segmentation via Center-Boundary Reasoningcited by 4
  26. 2023Box-based Refinement for Weakly Supervised and Unsupervised Localization Taskscited by 3
  27. 2022ILSGAN: Independent Layer Synthesis for Unsupervised Foreground-Background Segmentationcited by 2
  28. 2024SimSAM: Simple Siamese Representations Based Semantic Affinity Matrix for Unsupervised Image Segmentationcited by 2
  29. 2024Unsupervised Part Discovery via Dual Representation Alignmentcited by 2
  30. 2022EAA-Net: Rethinking the Autoencoder Architecture with Intra-class Features for Medical Image Segmentationcited by 1
  31. 2023SS-CPGAN: Self-Supervised Cut-and-Pasting Generative Adversarial Network for Object Segmentationcited by 1
  32. 2025SketchYourSeg: Mask-Free Subjective Image Segmentation via Freehand Sketchescited by 1
  33. 2026Learning Accurate Segmentation Purely from Self-Supervisioncited by 1
  34. 2023Local Region-to-Region Mapping-based Approach to Classify Articulated Objectscited by 0
  35. 2023A Sparse Graph Formulation for Efficient Spectral Image Segmentationcited by 0
  36. 2024PEEKABOO: Hiding parts of an image for unsupervised object localizationcited by 0
  37. 2024Seg-HGNN: Unsupervised and Light-Weight Image Segmentation with Hyperbolic Graph Neural Networkscited by 0
  38. 2025Ensemble Foreground Management for Unsupervised Object Discoverycited by 0

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