# Visual and Textual Prior Guided Mask Assemble for Few-Shot Segmentation and Beyond

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.07539 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.07539/

## Key facts

- Cited by 19 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 53 of its 83 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Aug 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 53)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [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)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning for Fast Adaptation of Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.03400/) (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)
- [Learning to Prompt for Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01134/) (2021)
- [Matching Networks for One Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.04080/) (2016)
- [Per-Pixel Classification is Not All You Need for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.06278/) (2021)
- [Learning to Compare: Relation Network for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.06025/) (2017)
- [Semantic Understanding of Scenes through the ADE20K Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.05442/) (2016)
- [Language-driven Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03546/) (2022)
- [Extract Free Dense Labels from CLIP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01071/) (2021)
- [Meta-Learning with Implicit Gradients](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.04630/) (2019)
- [Image Segmentation Using Text and Image Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10003/) (2021)
- [PANet: Few-Shot Image Semantic Segmentation with Prototype Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.06391/) (2019)
- [Tip-Adapter: Training-free Adaption of CLIP for Few-shot Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.09519/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Feature Weighting and Boosting for Few-Shot Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.13140/) (2019)
- [Part-aware Prototype Network for Few-shot Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.06309/) (2020)
- [Few-Shot Segmentation Without Meta-Learning: A Good Transductive Inference Is All You Need?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.06166/) (2020)
- [End-to-End Referring Video Object Segmentation with Multimodal Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14821/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [Image Segmentation in Foundation Model Era: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.12957/) (2024)
- [Adapt Before Comparison: A New Perspective on Cross-Domain Few-Shot Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17614/) (2024)
- [Rethinking Prior Information Generation with CLIP for Few-Shot Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.08458/) (2024)
- [A Novel Benchmark for Few-Shot Semantic Segmentation in the Era of Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.11311/) (2024)
- [Not All Data Are Unlearned Equally](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.05058/) (2025)
- [Vision-Language Model for Object Detection and Segmentation: A Review and Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.09480/) (2025)
- [Group-On: Boosting One-Shot Segmentation with Supportive Query](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.11871/) (2024)
- [Beyond Mask: Rethinking Guidance Types in Few-shot Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.11503/) (2024)
- [High-Performance Few-Shot Segmentation with Foundation Models: An Empirical Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.06305/) (2024)
- [SAMIC: Segment Anything with In-Context Spatial Prompt Engineering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.11998/) (2024)
- [UINO-FSS: Unifying Representation Learning and Few-shot Segmentation via Hierarchical Distillation and Mamba-HyperCorrelation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.15669/) (2025)
- [ViRefSAM: Visual Reference-Guided Segment Anything Model for Remote Sensing Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.02294/) (2025)
- [Unbiased Semantic Decoding with Vision Foundation Models for Few-shot Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.15118/) (2025)
- [Optimization of Prompt Learning via Multi-Knowledge Representation for Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.10357/) (2024)
- [Multi-Text Guided Few-Shot Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.15515/) (2025)
- [Beyond Visual Cues: Leveraging General Semantics as Support for Few-Shot Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.16435/) (2025)
- [Language Prompt vs. Image Enhancement: Boosting Object Detection With CLIP in Hazy Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.10637/) (2026)
- [GeoFlow: Geo-Aware Modeling of Inter-Area Relationships in Origin-Destination Flow Prediction and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.05257/) (2026)
- [Exploiting Target Knowledge from MLLMs for Robust Few-Shot Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.28949/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Few-shot segmentation (FSS) aims to segment the novel classes with a few annotated images. Due to CLIP's advantages of aligning visual and textual information, the integration of CLIP can enhance the generalization ability of FSS model. However, even with the CLIP model, the existing CLIP-based FSS methods are still subject to the biased prediction towards base classes, which is caused by the class-specific feature level interactions. To solve this issue, we propose a visual and textual Prior Guided Mask Assemble Network (PGMA-Net). It employs a class-agnostic mask assembly process to alleviate the bias, and formulates diverse tasks into a unified manner by assembling the prior through affinity. Specifically, the class-relevant textual and visual features are first transformed to class-agnostic prior in the form of probability map. Then, a Prior-Guided Mask Assemble Module (PGMAM) including multiple General Assemble Units (GAUs) is introduced. It considers diverse and plug-and-play interactions, such as visual-textual, inter- and intra-image, training-free, and high-order ones. Lastly, to ensure the class-agnostic ability, a Hierarchical Decoder with Channel-Drop Mechanism (HDCDM) is proposed to flexibly exploit the assembled masks and low-level features, without relying on any class-specific information. It achieves new state-of-the-art results in the FSS task, with mIoU of 77.6 on PASCAL-5i and 59.4 on COCO-20i in 1-shot scenario. Beyond this, we show that without extra re-training, the proposed PGMA-Net can solve bbox-level and cross-domain FSS, co-segmentation, zero-shot segmentation (ZSS) tasks, leading an any-shot segmentation framework.