Extending CLIP's Image-Text Alignment to Referring Image Segmentation
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Abstract (arXiv)
Referring Image Segmentation (RIS) is a cross-modal task that aims to segment an instance described by a natural language expression. Recent methods leverage large-scale pretrained unimodal models as backbones along with fusion techniques for joint reasoning across modalities. However, the inherent cross-modal nature of RIS raises questions about the effectiveness of unimodal backbones. We propose RISCLIP, a novel framework that effectively leverages the cross-modal nature of CLIP for RIS. Observing CLIP's inherent alignment between image and text features, we capitalize on this starting point and introduce simple but strong modules that enhance unimodal feature extraction and leverage rich alignment knowledge in CLIP's image-text shared-embedding space. RISCLIP exhibits outstanding results on all three major RIS benchmarks and also outperforms previous CLIP-based methods, demonstrating the efficacy of our strategy in extending CLIP's image-text alignment to RIS.
Key facts. Cited by 19 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 54 of its 79 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 14 Jun 2023.
Builds on
54 of 79 references.
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50 most cited of 54 All 54 (JSON)
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Citing papers per year: 2024: 7; 2025: 6; 2026: 6.
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- 2025Your Large Vision-Language Model Only Needs A Few Attention Heads For Visual Groundingcited by 78
- 2024Toward Visual Grounding: A Surveycited by 52
- 2024Image Segmentation in Foundation Model Era: A Surveycited by 35
- 2024HiVG: Hierarchical Multimodal Fine-grained Modulation for Visual Groundingcited by 31
- 2024OneRef: Unified One-tower Expression Grounding and Segmentation with Mask Referring Modelingcited by 28
- 2025Multimodal Referring Segmentation: A Surveycited by 22
- 2024Pseudo-RIS: Distinctive Pseudo-supervision Generation for Referring Image Segmentationcited by 13
- 2024CoHD: A Counting-Aware Hierarchical Decoding Framework for Generalized Referring Expression Segmentationcited by 10
- 2025Latent Expression Generation for Referring Image Segmentation and Groundingcited by 6
- 2025DGTRSD & DGTRS-CLIP: A Dual-Granularity Remote Sensing Image-Text Dataset and Vision Language Foundation Model for Alignmentcited by 4
- 2025SaFiRe: Saccade-Fixation Reiteration with Mamba for Referring Image Segmentationcited by 3
- 2026GenMask: Adapting DiT for Segmentation via Direct Mask Generationcited by 3
7 more
- 2024A Simple Baseline with Single-encoder for Referring Image Segmentationcited by 2
- 2026Guiding Diffusion-based Reconstruction with Contrastive Signals for Balanced Visual Representationcited by 2
- 2026SSP-SAM: SAM with Semantic-Spatial Prompt for Referring Expression Segmentationcited by 2
- 2025Holistic Order Prediction in Natural Scenescited by 1
- 2026Spatio-Semantic Expert Routing Architecture with Mixture-of-Experts for Referring Image Segmentationcited by 0
- 2026DiCoR: Decoupled Referent Disambiguation and Contour Recalibration for Efficient Referring Remote Sensing Image Segmentationcited by 0
- 2026DeCo: Efficient Decouple-to-Couple Learning for Multi-Task Visual Groundingcited by 0
- 2026DeCo: Efficient Decouple-to-Couple Learning for Multi-Task Visual Grounding21 Sep 2026
- 2026DiCoR: Decoupled Referent Disambiguation and Contour Recalibration for Efficient Referring Remote Sensing Image Segmentation13 Aug 2026
- 2026GenMask: Adapting DiT for Segmentation via Direct Mask Generation25 Mar 2026
- 2026SSP-SAM: SAM with Semantic-Spatial Prompt for Referring Expression Segmentation18 Mar 2026
- 2026Spatio-Semantic Expert Routing Architecture with Mixture-of-Experts for Referring Image Segmentation13 Mar 2026
- 2026Guiding Diffusion-based Reconstruction with Contrastive Signals for Balanced Visual Representation5 Mar 2026
- 2025SaFiRe: Saccade-Fixation Reiteration with Mamba for Referring Image Segmentation11 Oct 2025
- 2025Holistic Order Prediction in Natural Scenes2 Oct 2025
- 2025Latent Expression Generation for Referring Image Segmentation and Grounding7 Aug 2025
- 2025Multimodal Referring Segmentation: A Survey1 Aug 2025
- 2025DGTRSD & DGTRS-CLIP: A Dual-Granularity Remote Sensing Image-Text Dataset and Vision Language Foundation Model for Alignment25 Mar 2025
- 2025Your Large Vision-Language Model Only Needs A Few Attention Heads For Visual Grounding8 Mar 2025
7 more
- 2024Toward Visual Grounding: A Survey28 Dec 2024
- 2024OneRef: Unified One-tower Expression Grounding and Segmentation with Mask Referring Modeling10 Oct 2024
- 2024A Simple Baseline with Single-encoder for Referring Image Segmentation28 Aug 2024
- 2024Image Segmentation in Foundation Model Era: A Survey23 Aug 2024
- 2024Pseudo-RIS: Distinctive Pseudo-supervision Generation for Referring Image Segmentation10 Jul 2024
- 2024CoHD: A Counting-Aware Hierarchical Decoding Framework for Generalized Referring Expression Segmentation24 May 2024
- 2024HiVG: Hierarchical Multimodal Fine-grained Modulation for Visual Grounding20 Apr 2024
- 2024Image Segmentation in Foundation Model Era: A Surveycited by 35
- 2024Image Segmentation in Foundation Model Era: A Survey23 Aug 2024
- 2024Toward Visual Grounding: A Surveycited by 52
- 2024HiVG: Hierarchical Multimodal Fine-grained Modulation for Visual Groundingcited by 31
- 2024OneRef: Unified One-tower Expression Grounding and Segmentation with Mask Referring Modelingcited by 28
- 2025Multimodal Referring Segmentation: A Surveycited by 22
- 2024Pseudo-RIS: Distinctive Pseudo-supervision Generation for Referring Image Segmentationcited by 13
- 2024CoHD: A Counting-Aware Hierarchical Decoding Framework for Generalized Referring Expression Segmentationcited by 10
- 2025Latent Expression Generation for Referring Image Segmentation and Groundingcited by 6
- 2026GenMask: Adapting DiT for Segmentation via Direct Mask Generationcited by 3
- 2024A Simple Baseline with Single-encoder for Referring Image Segmentationcited by 2
- 2026Guiding Diffusion-based Reconstruction with Contrastive Signals for Balanced Visual Representationcited by 2
- 2026SSP-SAM: SAM with Semantic-Spatial Prompt for Referring Expression Segmentationcited by 2
- 2025Holistic Order Prediction in Natural Scenescited by 1
12 most cited of 14 All 14 (JSON)
- 2026DeCo: Efficient Decouple-to-Couple Learning for Multi-Task Visual Grounding21 Sep 2026
- 2026DiCoR: Decoupled Referent Disambiguation and Contour Recalibration for Efficient Referring Remote Sensing Image Segmentation13 Aug 2026
- 2026GenMask: Adapting DiT for Segmentation via Direct Mask Generation25 Mar 2026
- 2026SSP-SAM: SAM with Semantic-Spatial Prompt for Referring Expression Segmentation18 Mar 2026
- 2026Guiding Diffusion-based Reconstruction with Contrastive Signals for Balanced Visual Representation5 Mar 2026
- 2025Holistic Order Prediction in Natural Scenes2 Oct 2025
- 2025Latent Expression Generation for Referring Image Segmentation and Grounding7 Aug 2025
- 2025Multimodal Referring Segmentation: A Survey1 Aug 2025
- 2024Toward Visual Grounding: A Survey28 Dec 2024
- 2024OneRef: Unified One-tower Expression Grounding and Segmentation with Mask Referring Modeling10 Oct 2024
- 2024A Simple Baseline with Single-encoder for Referring Image Segmentation28 Aug 2024
- 2024Pseudo-RIS: Distinctive Pseudo-supervision Generation for Referring Image Segmentation10 Jul 2024
12 newest of 14 All 14 (JSON)