# Cross Language Image Matching for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.02668 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02668/

## Key facts

- Cited by 72 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 34 of its 48 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Mar 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 34)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [DeepLab: Semantic Image Segmentation with Deep Convolutional Nets, Atrous Convolution, and Fully Connected CRFs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.00915/) (2016)
- [Learning Deep Features for Discriminative Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.04150/) (2015)
- [Semantic Image Segmentation with Deep Convolutional Nets and Fully Connected CRFs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.7062/) (2014)
- [Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation with Cross-Consistency Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.09005/) (2020)
- [ScribbleSup: Scribble-Supervised Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.05144/) (2016)
- [Learning Pixel-level Semantic Affinity with Image-level Supervision for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.10464/) (2018)
- [Self-supervised Equivariant Attention Mechanism for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04581/) (2020)
- [What's the Point: Semantic Segmentation with Point Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02106/) (2015)
- [Weakly Supervised Learning of Instance Segmentation with Inter-pixel Relations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05044/) (2019)
- [BoxSup: Exploiting Bounding Boxes to Supervise Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.01640/) (2015)
- [Causal Intervention for Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.12547/) (2020)
- [Seed, Expand and Constrain: Three Principles for Weakly-Supervised Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.06098/) (2016)
- [Weakly- and Semi-Supervised Learning of a DCNN for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.02734/) (2015)
- [Wider or Deeper: Revisiting the ResNet Model for Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.10080/) (2016)
- [Tell Me Where to Look: Guided Attention Inference Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.10171/) (2018)
- [FickleNet: Weakly and Semi-supervised Semantic Image Segmentation using Stochastic Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.10421/) (2019)
- [Revisiting Dilated Convolution: A Simple Approach for Weakly- and Semi- Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.04574/) (2018)
- [Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation via Sub-category Exploration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.01183/) (2020)
- [Mining Cross-Image Semantics for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.01947/) (2020)
- [Anti-Adversarially Manipulated Attributions for Weakly and Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.08896/) (2021)
- [Railroad is not a Train: Saliency as Pseudo-pixel Supervision for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.08965/) (2021)
- [Learning random-walk label propagation for weakly-supervised semantic segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.00470/) (2018)
- [Constrained Convolutional Neural Networks for Weakly Supervised Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.03648/) (2015)
- [Self-Erasing Network for Integral Object Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.09821/) (2018)
- [Non-Salient Region Object Mining for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14581/) (2021)
- [Leveraging Auxiliary Tasks with Affinity Learning for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.11787/) (2021)
- [Discriminative Region Suppression for Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.07246/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 72)

- [Vision-Language Models for Vision Tasks: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.00685/) (2023)
- [CLIP is Also an Efficient Segmenter: A Text-Driven Approach for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09506/) (2022)
- [CLIP goes 3D: Leveraging Prompt Tuning for Language Grounded 3D Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11313/) (2023)
- [Diffusion Model is Secretly a Training-free Open Vocabulary Semantic Segmenter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.02773/) (2023)
- [CLIP as RNN: Segment Countless Visual Concepts without Training Endeavor](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.07661/) (2023)
- [LOCATE: Localize and Transfer Object Parts for Weakly Supervised Affordance Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.09665/) (2023)
- [Segment Anything Model (SAM) Enhanced Pseudo Labels for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.05803/) (2023)
- [A Survey on Label-efficient Deep Image Segmentation: Bridging the Gap between Weak Supervision and Dense Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.01223/) (2022)
- [Max Pooling with Vision Transformers reconciles class and shape in weakly supervised semantic segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.17400/) (2022)
- [Expansion and Shrinkage of Localization for Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.07761/) (2022)
- [Referring Image Segmentation Using Text Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.14575/) (2023)
- [Foundation Model Assisted Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03585/) (2023)
- [WeakTr: Exploring Plain Vision Transformer for Weakly-supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.01184/) (2023)
- [MCTformer+: Multi-Class Token Transformer for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.03005/) (2023)
- [SAMRefiner: Taming Segment Anything Model for Universal Mask Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.06756/) (2025)
- [Background Activation Suppression for Weakly Supervised Object Localization and Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.12943/) (2023)
- [CLIPer: Hierarchically Improving Spatial Representation of CLIP for Open-Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.13836/) (2024)
- [Prototype-Based Image Prompting for Weakly Supervised Histopathological Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.12068/) (2025)
- [Multi-Granularity Denoising and Bidirectional Alignment for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.05154/) (2023)
- [From Text to Mask: Localizing Entities Using the Attention of Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.04109/) (2023)
- [Hunting Attributes: Context Prototype-Aware Learning for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.07630/) (2024)
- [Frozen CLIP: A Strong Backbone for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.11189/) (2024)
- [USAGE: A Unified Seed Area Generation Paradigm for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.07806/) (2023)
- [Can CLIP Help Sound Source Localization?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.04066/) (2023)
- [Separate and Conquer: Decoupling Co-occurrence via Decomposition and Representation for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.18467/) (2024)
- [MARS: Model-agnostic Biased Object Removal without Additional Supervision for Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.09913/) (2023)
- [TCEIP: Text Condition Embedded Regression Network for Dental Implant Position Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.14406/) (2023)
- [iSeg: An Iterative Refinement-based Framework for Training-free Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.03209/) (2024)
- [Learning to Identify Critical States for Reinforcement Learning from Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.07795/) (2023)
- [Weakly-Supervised Affordance Grounding Guided by Part-Level Semantic Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.24103/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

It has been widely known that CAM (Class Activation Map) usually only activates discriminative object regions and falsely includes lots of object-related backgrounds. As only a fixed set of image-level object labels are available to the WSSS (weakly supervised semantic segmentation) model, it could be very difficult to suppress those diverse background regions consisting of open set objects. In this paper, we propose a novel Cross Language Image Matching (CLIMS) framework, based on the recently introduced Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) model, for WSSS. The core idea of our framework is to introduce natural language supervision to activate more complete object regions and suppress closely-related open background regions. In particular, we design object, background region and text label matching losses to guide the model to excite more reasonable object regions for CAM of each category. In addition, we design a co-occurring background suppression loss to prevent the model from activating closely-related background regions, with a predefined set of class-related background text descriptions. These designs enable the proposed CLIMS to generate a more complete and compact activation map for the target objects. Extensive experiments on PASCAL VOC2012 dataset show that our CLIMS significantly outperforms the previous state-of-the-art methods.