Understanding Self-Supervised Features for Learning Unsupervised Instance Segmentation
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Abstract (arXiv)
Self-supervised learning (SSL) can be used to solve complex visual tasks without human labels. Self-supervised representations encode useful semantic information about images, and as a result, they have already been used for tasks such as unsupervised semantic segmentation. In this paper, we investigate self-supervised representations for instance segmentation without any manual annotations. We find that the features of different SSL methods vary in their level of instance-awareness. In particular, DINO features, which are known to be excellent semantic descriptors, lack behind MAE features in their sensitivity for separating instances.
Key facts. Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 64 of its 69 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 24 Nov 2023.
Builds on
64 of 69 references.
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50 most cited of 64 All 64 (JSON)
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Citing papers per year: 2024: 3; 2025: 3; 2026: 1.
7 papers.
- 2024GLASS: Guided Latent Slot Diffusion for Object-Centric Learningcited by 14
- 2025SANSA: Unleashing the Hidden Semantics in SAM2 for Few-Shot Segmentationcited by 8
- 2024Upsampling DINOv2 features for unsupervised vision tasks and weakly supervised materials segmentationcited by 6
- 2025Boosting Generative Adversarial Transferability with Self-supervised Vision Transformer Featurescited by 3
- 2024Deep Spectral Improvement for Unsupervised Image Instance Segmentationcited by 1
- 2026What DINO saw: ALiBi positional encoding reduces positional bias in Vision Transformerscited by 1
- 2025Vision Foundry: A System for Training Foundational Vision AI Modelscited by 0
- 2026What DINO saw: ALiBi positional encoding reduces positional bias in Vision Transformers17 Mar 2026
- 2025Vision Foundry: A System for Training Foundational Vision AI Models3 Dec 2025
- 2025Boosting Generative Adversarial Transferability with Self-supervised Vision Transformer Features26 Jun 2025
- 2025SANSA: Unleashing the Hidden Semantics in SAM2 for Few-Shot Segmentation27 May 2025
- 2024Upsampling DINOv2 features for unsupervised vision tasks and weakly supervised materials segmentation20 Oct 2024
- 2024GLASS: Guided Latent Slot Diffusion for Object-Centric Learning25 Jul 2024
- 2024Deep Spectral Improvement for Unsupervised Image Instance Segmentation4 Feb 2024