# SEGIC: Unleashing the Emergent Correspondence for In-Context Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.14671 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.14671/

## Key facts

- Cited by 19 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 65 of its 75 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Nov 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 65)

- [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)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [Fully Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4038/) (2014)
- [Scaling Up Visual and Vision-Language Representation Learning With Noisy Text Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05918/) (2021)
- [A ConvNet for the 2020s](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03545/) (2022)
- [Grounding DINO: Marrying DINO with Grounded Pre-Training for Open-Set Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05499/) (2023)
- [DeepLab: Semantic Image Segmentation with Deep Convolutional Nets, Atrous Convolution, and Fully Connected CRFs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.00915/) (2016)
- [BEiT: BERT Pre-Training of Image Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.08254/) (2021)
- [Masked-attention Mask Transformer for Universal Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01527/) (2021)
- [Fourier Features Let Networks Learn High Frequency Functions in Low Dimensional Domains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.10739/) (2020)
- [Align before Fuse: Vision and Language Representation Learning with Momentum Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.07651/) (2021)
- [CoCa: Contrastive Captioners are Image-Text Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01917/) (2022)
- [Unified Perceptual Parsing for Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.10221/) (2018)
- [LVIS: A Dataset for Large Vocabulary Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.03195/) (2019)
- [Per-Pixel Classification is Not All You Need for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.06278/) (2021)
- [Semantic Understanding of Scenes through the ADE20K Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.05442/) (2016)
- [The 2017 DAVIS Challenge on Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.00675/) (2017)

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

- [A Simple Image Segmentation Framework via In-Context Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.04842/) (2024)
- [Show and Segment: Universal Medical Image Segmentation via In-Context Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.19359/) (2025)
- [A Novel Benchmark for Few-Shot Semantic Segmentation in the Era of Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.11311/) (2024)
- [INSID3: Training-Free In-Context Segmentation with DINOv3](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.28480/) (2026)
- [Personalized Instance-based Navigation Toward User-Specific Objects in Realistic Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.18195/) (2024)
- [INST-IT: Boosting Instance Understanding via Explicit Visual Prompt Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.03565/) (2024)
- [SANSA: Unleashing the Hidden Semantics in SAM2 for Few-Shot Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.21795/) (2025)
- [Unified Open-World Segmentation with Multi-Modal Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.10524/) (2025)
- [Mind-the-Glitch: Visual Correspondence for Detecting Inconsistencies in Subject-Driven Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.21989/) (2025)
- [Studying Image Diffusion Features for Zero-Shot Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.05468/) (2025)
- [Comprehensive Multi-Modal Prototypes are Simple and Effective Classifiers for Vast-Vocabulary Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.17800/) (2024)
- [UINO-FSS: Unifying Representation Learning and Few-shot Segmentation via Hierarchical Distillation and Mamba-HyperCorrelation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.15669/) (2025)
- [Personalized OVSS: Understanding Personal Concept in Open-Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.11030/) (2025)
- [Unify the Views: View-Consistent Prototype Learning for Few-Shot Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.05952/) (2026)
- [Toward Robust In-Context Segmentation via Concept Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.28149/) (2026)
- [FROST: Training-Free Few-Shot Segmentation with Frozen Features and Nonparametric Statistics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.31136/) (2026)
- [REBASE: Reference-Background Subspace Elimination for Training-Free In-Context Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.09082/) (2026)
- [FoundYou: A Unified Model for Personalized Segmentation and Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.29917/) (2026)
- [FoRIS: Progressive Foreground Refinement for Training-Free In-Context Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.03384/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In-context segmentation aims at segmenting novel images using a few labeled example images, termed as "in-context examples", exploring content similarities between examples and the target. The resulting models can be generalized seamlessly to novel segmentation tasks, significantly reducing the labeling and training costs compared with conventional pipelines. However, in-context segmentation is more challenging than classic ones requiring the model to learn segmentation rules conditioned on a few samples. Unlike previous work with ad-hoc or non-end-to-end designs, we propose SEGIC, an end-to-end segment-in-context framework built upon a single vision foundation model (VFM). In particular, SEGIC leverages the emergent correspondence within VFM to capture dense relationships between target images and in-context samples. As such, information from in-context samples is then extracted into three types of instructions, i.e. geometric, visual, and meta instructions, serving as explicit conditions for the final mask prediction. SEGIC is a straightforward yet effective approach that yields state-of-the-art performance on one-shot segmentation benchmarks. Notably, SEGIC can be easily generalized to diverse tasks, including video object segmentation and open-vocabulary segmentation. Code will be available at https://github.com/MengLcool/SEGIC.