# Segment-Anything Models Achieve Zero-shot Robustness in Autonomous Driving

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.09839 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.09839/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 45 of its 51 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Aug 2024.

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

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [Explaining and Harnessing Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6572/) (2014)
- [Towards Deep Learning Models Resistant to Adversarial Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.06083/) (2017)
- [Rethinking the Inception Architecture for Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.00567/) (2015)
- [Fully Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4038/) (2014)
- [MobileNetV2: Inverted Residuals and Linear Bottlenecks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04381/) (2018)
- [The Cityscapes Dataset for Semantic Urban Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.01685/) (2016)
- [On the Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07258/) (2021)
- [Encoder-Decoder with Atrous Separable Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.02611/) (2018)
- [Towards Evaluating the Robustness of Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.04644/) (2016)
- [SegFormer: Simple and Efficient Design for Semantic Segmentation with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.15203/) (2021)
- [Benchmarking Neural Network Robustness to Common Corruptions and Perturbations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.12261/) (2019)
- [Pyramid Scene Parsing Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01105/) (2016)
- [Xception: Deep Learning with Depthwise Separable Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02357/) (2016)
- [Rethinking Atrous Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.05587/) (2017)
- [SegNet: A Deep Convolutional Encoder-Decoder Architecture for Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.00561/) (2015)
- [ImageNet-trained CNNs are biased towards texture; increasing shape bias improves accuracy and robustness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.12231/) (2018)
- [Deep High-Resolution Representation Learning for Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07919/) (2019)
- [Universal adversarial perturbations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.08401/) (2016)
- [Segmentation Transformer: Object-Contextual Representations for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.11065/) (2019)
- [Black-box Adversarial Attacks with Limited Queries and Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.08598/) (2018)
- [Faster Segment Anything: Towards Lightweight SAM for Mobile Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.14289/) (2023)
- [Benchmarking Robustness in Object Detection: Autonomous Driving when Winter is Coming](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.07484/) (2019)
- [OneFormer: One Transformer to Rule Universal Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.06220/) (2022)
- [Fast Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.12156/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [UncertainSAM: Fast and Efficient Uncertainty Quantification of the Segment Anything Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.05049/) (2025)
- [Zero-Shot Pupil Segmentation with SAM 2: A Case Study of Over 14 Million Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.08926/) (2024)
- [Region-Guided Attack on the Segment Anything Model (SAM)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.02974/) (2024)
- [Self-Supervised Real-Time Tracking of Military Vehicles in Low-FPS UAV Footage](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.05229/) (2025)
- [Granular Computing-driven SAM: From Coarse-to-Fine Guidance for Prompt-Free Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.19062/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Semantic segmentation is a significant perception task in autonomous driving. It suffers from the risks of adversarial examples. In the past few years, deep learning has gradually transitioned from convolutional neural network (CNN) models with a relatively small number of parameters to foundation models with a huge number of parameters. The segment-anything model (SAM) is a generalized image segmentation framework that is capable of handling various types of images and is able to recognize and segment arbitrary objects in an image without the need to train on a specific object. It is a unified model that can handle diverse downstream tasks, including semantic segmentation, object detection, and tracking. In the task of semantic segmentation for autonomous driving, it is significant to study the zero-shot adversarial robustness of SAM. Therefore, we deliver a systematic empirical study on the robustness of SAM without additional training. Based on the experimental results, the zero-shot adversarial robustness of the SAM under the black-box corruptions and white-box adversarial attacks is acceptable, even without the need for additional training. The finding of this study is insightful in that the gigantic model parameters and huge amounts of training data lead to the phenomenon of emergence, which builds a guarantee of adversarial robustness. SAM is a vision foundation model that can be regarded as an early prototype of an artificial general intelligence (AGI) pipeline. In such a pipeline, a unified model can handle diverse tasks. Therefore, this research not only inspects the impact of vision foundation models on safe autonomous driving but also provides a perspective on developing trustworthy AGI. The code is available at: https://github.com/momo1986/robust_sam_iv.