# A Lightweight Clustering Framework for Unsupervised Semantic Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.18628 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.18628/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 45 of its 54 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 Nov 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 45)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [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)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [The Cityscapes Dataset for Semantic Urban Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.01685/) (2016)
- [Zero-Shot Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12092/) (2021)
- [SegFormer: Simple and Efficient Design for Semantic Segmentation with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.15203/) (2021)
- [Masked-attention Mask Transformer for Universal Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01527/) (2021)
- [ViLBERT: Pretraining Task-Agnostic Visiolinguistic Representations for Vision-and-Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.02265/) (2019)
- [Dual Attention Network for Scene Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.02983/) (2018)
- [Segmenter: Transformer for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05633/) (2021)
- [PraNet: Parallel Reverse Attention Network for Polyp Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11392/) (2020)
- [Invariant Information Clustering for Unsupervised Image Classification and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.06653/) (2018)
- [DeiT III: Revenge of the ViT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.07118/) (2022)
- [ScribbleSup: Scribble-Supervised Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.05144/) (2016)
- [Self-supervised Equivariant Attention Mechanism for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04581/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Semantic Segmentation by Distilling Feature Correspondences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.08414/) (2022)
- [Gland Segmentation in Colon Histology Images: The GlaS Challenge Contest](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.00275/) (2016)
- [Unsupervised Semantic Segmentation by Contrasting Object Mask Proposals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.06191/) (2021)
- [Cut and Learn for Unsupervised Object Detection and Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.11320/) (2023)
- [PiCIE: Unsupervised Semantic Segmentation using Invariance and Equivariance in Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.17070/) (2021)
- [FickleNet: Weakly and Semi-supervised Semantic Image Segmentation using Stochastic Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.10421/) (2019)
- [Deep Spectral Methods: A Surprisingly Strong Baseline for Unsupervised Semantic Segmentation and Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.07839/) (2022)
- [Multi-class Token Transformer for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02891/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Upsampling DINOv2 features for unsupervised vision tasks and weakly supervised materials segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.19836/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Unsupervised semantic segmentation aims to categorize each pixel in an image into a corresponding class without the use of annotated data. It is a widely researched area as obtaining labeled datasets is expensive. While previous works in the field have demonstrated a gradual improvement in model accuracy, most required neural network training. This made segmentation equally expensive, especially when dealing with large-scale datasets. We thus propose a lightweight clustering framework for unsupervised semantic segmentation. We discovered that attention features of the self-supervised Vision Transformer exhibit strong foreground-background differentiability. Therefore, clustering can be employed to effectively separate foreground and background image patches. In our framework, we first perform multilevel clustering across the Dataset-level, Category-level, and Image-level, and maintain consistency throughout. Then, the binary patch-level pseudo-masks extracted are upsampled, refined and finally labeled. Furthermore, we provide a comprehensive analysis of the self-supervised Vision Transformer features and a detailed comparison between DINO and DINOv2 to justify our claims. Our framework demonstrates great promise in unsupervised semantic segmentation and achieves state-of-the-art results on PASCAL VOC and MS COCO datasets.