# Attentional Prototype Inference for Few-Shot Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.06668 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.06668/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 17 of its 38 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 May 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Fully Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4038/) (2014)
- [Auto-Encoding Variational Bayes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6114/) (2013)
- [DeepLab: Semantic Image Segmentation with Deep Convolutional Nets, Atrous Convolution, and Fully Connected CRFs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.00915/) (2016)
- [Prototypical Networks for Few-shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.05175/) (2017)
- [Pyramid Scene Parsing Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01105/) (2016)
- [PANet: Few-Shot Image Semantic Segmentation with Prototype Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.06391/) (2019)
- [One-Shot Learning for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.03410/) (2017)
- [A Probabilistic U-Net for Segmentation of Ambiguous Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.05034/) (2018)
- [Prior Guided Feature Enrichment Network for Few-Shot Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.01449/) (2020)
- [Adaptive Prototype Learning and Allocation for Few-Shot Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.01893/) (2021)
- [Hypercorrelation Squeeze for Few-Shot Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.01538/) (2021)
- [Prototype Mixture Models for Few-shot Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.03898/) (2020)
- [Feature Weighting and Boosting for Few-Shot Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.13140/) (2019)
- [FSS-1000: A 1000-Class Dataset for Few-Shot Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.12347/) (2019)
- [CRNet: Cross-Reference Networks for Few-Shot Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.10658/) (2020)
- [Learning What to Learn for Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.11540/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Rethinking Prior Information Generation with CLIP for Few-Shot Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.08458/) (2024)
- [MSDNet: Multi-Scale Decoder for Few-Shot Semantic Segmentation via Transformer-Guided Prototyping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.11316/) (2024)
- [Beyond Mask: Rethinking Guidance Types in Few-shot Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.11503/) (2024)
- [ENInst: Enhancing Weakly-supervised Low-shot Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.09765/) (2023)
- [LiteNeXt: A Novel Lightweight ConvMixer-based Model with Self-embedding Representation Parallel for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.15779/) (2024)
- [GMBFormer: An NDVI-Guided Global Memory Bank Transformer for Urban Green-Space Extraction from Ultra-High-Resolution Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.06363/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper aims to address few-shot segmentation. While existing prototype-based methods have achieved considerable success, they suffer from uncertainty and ambiguity caused by limited labeled examples. In this work, we propose attentional prototype inference (API), a probabilistic latent variable framework for few-shot segmentation. We define a global latent variable to represent the prototype of each object category, which we model as a probabilistic distribution. The probabilistic modeling of the prototype enhances the model's generalization ability by handling the inherent uncertainty caused by limited data and intra-class variations of objects. To further enhance the model, we introduce a local latent variable to represent the attention map of each query image, which enables the model to attend to foreground objects while suppressing the background. The optimization of the proposed model is formulated as a variational Bayesian inference problem, which is established by amortized inference networks. We conduct extensive experiments on four benchmarks, where our proposal obtains at least competitive and often better performance than state-of-the-art prototype-based methods. We also provide comprehensive analyses and ablation studies to gain insight into the effectiveness of our method for few-shot segmentation.