# Language-guided Few-shot Semantic Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.13865 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.13865/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 21 of its 33 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Nov 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [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)
- [Grad-CAM: Visual Explanations from Deep Networks via Gradient-based Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02391/) (2016)
- [CLIP4Clip: An Empirical Study of CLIP for End to End Video Clip Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08860/) (2021)
- [Extract Free Dense Labels from CLIP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01071/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Expanding Language-Image Pretrained Models for General Video Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.02816/) (2022)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Decoupling Zero-Shot Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.07910/) (2021)
- [A Review of Generalized Zero-Shot Learning Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.08641/) (2020)
- [Learning What Not to Segment: A New Perspective on Few-Shot Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.07615/) (2022)
- [Few-Shot Classification with Feature Map Reconstruction Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.01506/) (2020)
- [MSANet: Multi-Similarity and Attention Guidance for Boosting Few-Shot Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.09667/) (2022)
- [A Concise Review of Recent Few-shot Meta-learning Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.10953/) (2020)
- [A Pixel-Level Meta-Learner for Weakly Supervised Few-Shot Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.01418/) (2021)
- [Iterative Few-shot Semantic Segmentation from Image Label Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05646/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Image Segmentation in Foundation Model Era: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.12957/) (2024)
- [DSV-LFS: Unifying LLM-Driven Semantic Cues with Visual Features for Robust Few-Shot Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.04006/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Few-shot learning is a promising way for reducing the label cost in new categories adaptation with the guidance of a small, well labeled support set. But for few-shot semantic segmentation, the pixel-level annotations of support images are still expensive. In this paper, we propose an innovative solution to tackle the challenge of few-shot semantic segmentation using only language information, i.e.image-level text labels. Our approach involves a vision-language-driven mask distillation scheme, which contains a vision-language pretraining (VLP) model and a mask refiner, to generate high quality pseudo-semantic masks from text prompts. We additionally introduce a distributed prototype supervision method and complementary correlation matching module to guide the model in digging precise semantic relations among support and query images. The experiments on two benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method establishes a new baseline for language-guided few-shot semantic segmentation and achieves competitive results to recent vision-guided methods.