# Unleashing the Potential of the Diffusion Model in Few-shot Semantic Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.02369 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.02369/

## Key facts

- Cited by 16 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Medical imaging and segmentation, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 55 of its 64 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Oct 2024.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [Medical imaging and segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/medical-imaging-and-segmentation/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 55)

- [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)
- [Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05233/) (2021)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [LAION-5B: An open large-scale dataset for training next generation image-text models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08402/) (2022)
- [InstructPix2Pix: Learning to Follow Image Editing Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09800/) (2022)
- [Prompt-to-Prompt Image Editing with Cross Attention Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.01626/) (2022)
- [Video Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03458/) (2022)
- [Imagen Video: High Definition Video Generation with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02303/) (2022)
- [Tune-A-Video: One-Shot Tuning of Image Diffusion Models for Text-to-Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.11565/) (2022)
- [LISA: Reasoning Segmentation via Large Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.00692/) (2023)
- [Segment Everything Everywhere All at Once](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.06718/) (2023)
- [Emergent Correspondence from Image Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.03881/) (2023)
- [InstantID: Zero-shot Identity-Preserving Generation in Seconds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.07519/) (2024)
- [ELITE: Encoding Visual Concepts into Textual Embeddings for Customized Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13848/) (2023)
- [Open-Vocabulary Panoptic Segmentation with Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.04803/) (2023)
- [One-Shot Learning for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.03410/) (2017)
- [PhotoMaker: Customizing Realistic Human Photos via Stacked ID Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.04461/) (2023)
- [Repurposing Diffusion-Based Image Generators for Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02145/) (2023)
- [Images Speak in Images: A Generalist Painter for In-Context Visual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.02499/) (2022)
- [A Tale of Two Features: Stable Diffusion Complements DINO for Zero-Shot Semantic Correspondence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15347/) (2023)
- [GeoWizard: Unleashing the Diffusion Priors for 3D Geometry Estimation from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.12013/) (2024)
- [Unleashing Text-to-Image Diffusion Models for Visual Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.02153/) (2023)
- [Personalize Segment Anything Model with One Shot](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.03048/) (2023)
- [MOSE: A New Dataset for Video Object Segmentation in Complex Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.01872/) (2023)
- [MeViS: A Large-scale Benchmark for Video Segmentation with Motion Expressions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.08544/) (2023)
- [Diffusion Hyperfeatures: Searching Through Time and Space for Semantic Correspondence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14334/) (2023)
- [Adaptive Prototype Learning and Allocation for Few-Shot Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.01893/) (2021)
- [SegGPT: Segmenting Everything In Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03284/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [Omni-R1: Reinforcement Learning for Omnimodal Reasoning via Two-System Collaboration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.20256/) (2025)
- [DICEPTION: A Generalist Diffusion Model for Visual Perceptual Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.17157/) (2025)
- [TUNA: Taming Unified Visual Representations for Native Unified Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.02014/) (2025)
- [A Simple Image Segmentation Framework via In-Context Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.04842/) (2024)
- [No time to train! Training-Free Reference-Based Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.02798/) (2025)
- [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)
- [Jodi: Unification of Visual Generation and Understanding via Joint Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.19084/) (2025)
- [Unbiased Semantic Decoding with Vision Foundation Models for Few-shot Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.15118/) (2025)
- [Boosting SAM for Cross-Domain Few-Shot Segmentation via Conditional Point Sparsification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.05218/) (2026)
- [Make It Up: Fake Images, Real Gains in Generalized Few-shot Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.27206/) (2026)
- [Unlocking Diffusion Hierarchies: Adaptive Timestep Selection for Zero-Shot Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.15590/) (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)
- [FoRIS: Progressive Foreground Refinement for Training-Free In-Context Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.03384/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The Diffusion Model has not only garnered noteworthy achievements in the realm of image generation but has also demonstrated its potential as an effective pretraining method utilizing unlabeled data. Drawing from the extensive potential unveiled by the Diffusion Model in both semantic correspondence and open vocabulary segmentation, our work initiates an investigation into employing the Latent Diffusion Model for Few-shot Semantic Segmentation. Recently, inspired by the in-context learning ability of large language models, Few-shot Semantic Segmentation has evolved into In-context Segmentation tasks, morphing into a crucial element in assessing generalist segmentation models. In this context, we concentrate on Few-shot Semantic Segmentation, establishing a solid foundation for the future development of a Diffusion-based generalist model for segmentation. Our initial focus lies in understanding how to facilitate interaction between the query image and the support image, resulting in the proposal of a KV fusion method within the self-attention framework. Subsequently, we delve deeper into optimizing the infusion of information from the support mask and simultaneously re-evaluating how to provide reasonable supervision from the query mask. Based on our analysis, we establish a simple and effective framework named DiffewS, maximally retaining the original Latent Diffusion Model's generative framework and effectively utilizing the pre-training prior. Experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms the previous SOTA models in multiple settings.