# MFNet: Multi-class Few-shot Segmentation Network with Pixel-wise Metric Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.00232 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.00232/

## Key facts

- Cited by 10 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 54 of its 82 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 Oct 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 54)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [Fully Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4038/) (2014)
- [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)
- [FaceNet: A Unified Embedding for Face Recognition and Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03832/) (2015)
- [Matching Networks for One Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.04080/) (2016)
- [Rethinking Atrous Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.05587/) (2017)
- [Segmenter: Transformer for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05633/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Relation Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.11575/) (2017)
- [Context Encoding for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.08904/) (2018)
- [Prior Guided Feature Enrichment Network for Few-Shot Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.01449/) (2020)
- [Few-shot Object Detection via Feature Reweighting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01866/) (2018)
- [Causal Intervention for Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.12547/) (2020)
- [CANet: Class-Agnostic Segmentation Networks with Iterative Refinement and Attentive Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.02351/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Meta R-CNN : Towards General Solver for Instance-level Few-shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.13032/) (2019)
- [Low-Shot Learning from Imaginary Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.05401/) (2018)
- [Attention to Scale: Scale-aware Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.03339/) (2015)
- [SG-One: Similarity Guidance Network for One-Shot Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.09091/) (2018)
- [Part-aware Prototype Network for Few-shot Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.06309/) (2020)
- [Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation with High- and Low-level Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.05724/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [Rethinking Prior Information Generation with CLIP for Few-Shot Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.08458/) (2024)
- [Label Anything: Multi-Class Few-Shot Semantic Segmentation with Visual Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.02075/) (2024)
- [Revealing the Semantic Selection Gap in DINOv3 through Training-Free Few-Shot Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.07550/) (2026)
- [Weighting Pseudo-Labels via High-Activation Feature Index Similarity and Object Detection for Semi-Supervised Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.12630/) (2024)
- [Enhancing Generalized Few-Shot Semantic Segmentation via Effective Knowledge Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.15835/) (2024)
- [Balancing Conservatism and Aggressiveness: Prototype-Affinity Hybrid Network for Few-Shot Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.19140/) (2025)
- [Take a Peek: Efficient Encoder Adaptation for Few-Shot Semantic Segmentation via LoRA](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.10521/) (2025)
- [Boosting Few-Shot Segmentation via Instance-Aware Data Augmentation and Local Consensus Guided Cross Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.09866/) (2024)
- [Memory-guided Network with Uncertainty-based Feature Augmentation for Few-shot Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.00545/) (2024)
- [Efficient Masked Attention Transformer for Few-Shot Classification and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.23642/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In visual recognition tasks, few-shot learning requires the ability to learn object categories with few support examples. Its re-popularity in light of the deep learning development is mainly in image classification. This work focuses on few-shot semantic segmentation, which is still a largely unexplored field. A few recent advances are often restricted to single-class few-shot segmentation. In this paper, we first present a novel multi-way (class) encoding and decoding architecture which effectively fuses multi-scale query information and multi-class support information into one query-support embedding. Multi-class segmentation is directly decoded upon this embedding. For better feature fusion, a multi-level attention mechanism is proposed within the architecture, which includes the attention for support feature modulation and attention for multi-scale combination. Last, to enhance the embedding space learning, an additional pixel-wise metric learning module is introduced with triplet loss formulated on the pixel-level embedding of the input image. Extensive experiments on standard benchmarks PASCAL-5i and COCO-20i show clear benefits of our method over the state of the art in few-shot segmentation