# Iterative Few-shot Semantic Segmentation from Image Label Text

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.05646 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05646/

## Key facts

- Cited by 10 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 25 of its 29 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Mar 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 25 of 25)

- [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)
- [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)
- [Grad-CAM: Visual Explanations from Deep Networks via Gradient-based Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02391/) (2016)
- [CLIP-Adapter: Better Vision-Language Models with Feature Adapters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.04544/) (2021)
- [Language-driven Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03546/) (2022)
- [DenseCLIP: Language-Guided Dense Prediction with Context-Aware Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01518/) (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)
- [Prior Guided Feature Enrichment Network for Few-Shot Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.01449/) (2020)
- [Zero-Shot Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.00817/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Few-Shot Segmentation Without Meta-Learning: A Good Transductive Inference Is All You Need?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.06166/) (2020)
- [Simpler is Better: Few-shot Semantic Segmentation with Classifier Weight Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.03032/) (2021)
- [Self-Guided and Cross-Guided Learning for Few-Shot Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.16129/) (2021)
- [Mining Latent Classes for Few-shot Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15402/) (2021)
- [Learning Meta-class Memory for Few-Shot Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.02958/) (2021)
- [Anti-aliasing Semantic Reconstruction for Few-Shot Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.00184/) (2021)
- [A Pixel-Level Meta-Learner for Weakly Supervised Few-Shot Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.01418/) (2021)
- [Boosting Few-shot Semantic Segmentation with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.02266/) (2021)
- [Few-shot Semantic Segmentation with Self-supervision from Pseudo-classes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.11742/) (2021)

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

- [Visual and Textual Prior Guided Mask Assemble for Few-Shot Segmentation and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.07539/) (2023)
- [OmniCLIP: Adapting CLIP for Video Recognition with Spatial-Temporal Omni-Scale Feature Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.06158/) (2024)
- [Training-Free Semantic Segmentation via LLM-Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.00701/) (2024)
- [Beyond Mask: Rethinking Guidance Types in Few-shot Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.11503/) (2024)
- [Language-guided Few-shot Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.13865/) (2023)
- [AFANet: Adaptive Frequency-Aware Network for Weakly-Supervised Few-Shot Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.17601/) (2024)
- [Textual and Visual Guided Task Adaptation for Source-Free Cross-Domain Few-Shot Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.05213/) (2025)
- [Learning Robust Correlation with Foundation Model for Weakly-Supervised Few-Shot Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.19638/) (2024)
- [No Re-Train, More Gain: Upgrading Backbones with Diffusion model for Pixel-Wise and Weakly-Supervised Few-Shot Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.16182/) (2024)
- [Symmetrical Joint Learning Support-query Prototypes for Few-shot Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.19306/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Few-shot semantic segmentation aims to learn to segment unseen class objects with the guidance of only a few support images. Most previous methods rely on the pixel-level label of support images. In this paper, we focus on a more challenging setting, in which only the image-level labels are available. We propose a general framework to firstly generate coarse masks with the help of the powerful vision-language model CLIP, and then iteratively and mutually refine the mask predictions of support and query images. Extensive experiments on PASCAL-5i and COCO-20i datasets demonstrate that our method not only outperforms the state-of-the-art weakly supervised approaches by a significant margin, but also achieves comparable or better results to recent supervised methods. Moreover, our method owns an excellent generalization ability for the images in the wild and uncommon classes. Code will be available at https://github.com/Whileherham/IMR-HSNet.