Boosting Unsupervised Semantic Segmentation with Principal Mask Proposals
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Abstract (arXiv)
Unsupervised semantic segmentation aims to automatically partition images into semantically meaningful regions by identifying global semantic categories within an image corpus without any form of annotation. Building upon recent advances in self-supervised representation learning, we focus on how to leverage these large pre-trained models for the downstream task of unsupervised segmentation. We present PriMaPs - Principal Mask Proposals - decomposing images into semantically meaningful masks based on their feature representation. This allows us to realize unsupervised semantic segmentation by fitting class prototypes to PriMaPs with a stochastic expectation-maximization algorithm, PriMaPs-EM. Despite its conceptual simplicity, PriMaPs-EM leads to competitive results across various pre-trained backbone models, including DINO and DINOv2, and across different datasets, such as Cityscapes, COCO-Stuff, and Potsdam-3. Importantly, PriMaPs-EM is able to boost results when applied orthogonally to current state-of-the-art unsupervised semantic segmentation pipelines. Code is available at https://github.com/visinf/primaps.
Key facts. Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 48 of its 64 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 25 Apr 2024.
Builds on
48 of 64 references.
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Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2024: 1; 2025: 5; 2026: 3.
9 papers.
- 2025Feed-Forward SceneDINO for Unsupervised Semantic Scene Completioncited by 13
- 2025Scene-Centric Unsupervised Panoptic Segmentationcited by 10
- 2024Rethinking Decoders for Transformer-based Semantic Segmentation: A Compression Perspectivecited by 3
- 2025WakeupUrban: Unsupervised Semantic Segmentation of Mid-20th century Urban Landscapes with Satellite Imagerycited by 1
- 2026SegFly: A Dataset and 2D-3D-2D Paradigm for Aerial RGB-Thermal Semantic Segmentation at Scalecited by 1
- 2025Federated Unsupervised Semantic Segmentationcited by 0
- 2025MSSSeg: Learning Multi-Scale Structural Complexity for Self-Supervised Segmentationcited by 0
- 2026Unsupervised Semantic Segmentation Facilitates Model Understandingcited by 0
- 2026CrevasseSeg: A Label-Efficient UAV Crevasse Segmentation Frameworkcited by 0
- 2026CrevasseSeg: A Label-Efficient UAV Crevasse Segmentation Framework16 Aug 2026
- 2026Unsupervised Semantic Segmentation Facilitates Model Understanding28 May 2026
- 2026SegFly: A Dataset and 2D-3D-2D Paradigm for Aerial RGB-Thermal Semantic Segmentation at Scale18 Mar 2026
- 2025MSSSeg: Learning Multi-Scale Structural Complexity for Self-Supervised Segmentation30 Dec 2025
- 2025Feed-Forward SceneDINO for Unsupervised Semantic Scene Completion8 Jul 2025
- 2025WakeupUrban: Unsupervised Semantic Segmentation of Mid-20th century Urban Landscapes with Satellite Imagery11 Jun 2025
- 2025Federated Unsupervised Semantic Segmentation29 May 2025
- 2025Scene-Centric Unsupervised Panoptic Segmentation2 Apr 2025
- 2024Rethinking Decoders for Transformer-based Semantic Segmentation: A Compression Perspective5 Nov 2024