AM-SAM: Automated Prompting and Mask Calibration for Segment Anything Model

Segment Anything Model (SAM) has gained significant recognition in the field of semantic segmentation due to its versatile capabilities and impressive performance. Despite its success, SAM faces two primary limitations: (1) it relies heavily on meticulous human-provided prompts like key points, bounding boxes or text messages, which is labor-intensive; (2) the mask decoder's feature representation is sometimes inaccurate, as it solely employs dot product operations at the end of mask decoder, which inadequately captures the necessary correlations for precise segmentation. Current solutions to these problems such as fine-tuning SAM often require retraining a large number of parameters, which needs huge amount of time and computing resources. To address these limitations, we propose an automated prompting and mask calibration method called AM-SAM based on a bi-level optimization framework. Our approach automatically generates prompts for an input image, eliminating the need for human involvement with a good performance in early training epochs, achieving faster convergence. Additionally, we freeze the main part of SAM, and modify the mask decoder with Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), enhancing the mask decoder's feature representation by incorporating advanced techniques that go beyond simple dot product operations to more accurately capture and utilize feature correlations. Our experimental results demonstrate that AM-SAM achieves significantly accurate segmentation, matching or exceeding the effectiveness of human-generated and default prompts. Notably, on the body segmentation dataset, our method yields a 5% higher dice score with a 4-example few-shot training set compared to the SOTA method, underscoring its superiority in semantic segmentation tasks.