# Foundation Model or Finetune? Evaluation of few-shot semantic segmentation for river pollution

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.03754 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.03754/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 11 of its 23 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Sep 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [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)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [You Only Look Once: Unified, Real-Time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02640/) (2015)
- [The Cityscapes Dataset for Semantic Urban Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.01685/) (2016)
- [Grounded SAM: Assembling Open-World Models for Diverse Visual Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.14159/) (2024)
- [Images Speak in Images: A Generalist Painter for In-Context Visual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.02499/) (2022)
- [Personalize Segment Anything Model with One Shot](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.03048/) (2023)
- [The Shaky Foundations of Clinical Foundation Models: A Survey of Large Language Models and Foundation Models for EMRs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12961/) (2023)

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

- [REMSA: Foundation Model Selection for Remote Sensing via a Constraint-Aware Agent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.17442/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Foundation models (FMs) are a popular topic of research in AI. Their ability to generalize to new tasks and datasets without retraining or needing an abundance of data makes them an appealing candidate for applications on specialist datasets. In this work, we compare the performance of FMs to finetuned pre-trained supervised models in the task of semantic segmentation on an entirely new dataset. We see that finetuned models consistently outperform the FMs tested, even in cases were data is scarce. We release the code and dataset for this work on GitHub.