# Guided SAM: Label-Efficient Part Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.07434 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.07434/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 10 of its 18 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Jan 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [Grounding DINO: Marrying DINO with Grounded Pre-Training for Open-Set Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05499/) (2023)
- [LVIS: A Dataset for Large Vocabulary Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.03195/) (2019)
- [Grounded SAM: Assembling Open-World Models for Diverse Visual Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.14159/) (2024)
- [PACO: Parts and Attributes of Common Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.01795/) (2023)
- [Fashionpedia: Ontology, Segmentation, and an Attribute Localization Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.12276/) (2020)
- [Going Denser with Open-Vocabulary Part Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11173/) (2023)
- [OV-PARTS: Towards Open-Vocabulary Part Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.05107/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Localizing object parts precisely is essential for tasks such as object recognition and robotic manipulation. Recent part segmentation methods require extensive training data and labor-intensive annotations. Segment-Anything Model (SAM) has demonstrated good performance on a wide range of segmentation problems, but requires (manual) positional prompts to guide it where to segment. Furthermore, since it has been trained on full objects instead of object parts, it is prone to over-segmentation of parts. To address this, we propose a novel approach that guides SAM towards the relevant object parts. Our method learns positional prompts from coarse patch annotations that are easier and cheaper to acquire. We train classifiers on image patches to identify part classes and aggregate patches into regions of interest (ROIs) with positional prompts. SAM is conditioned on these ROIs and prompts. This approach, termed `Guided SAM', enhances efficiency and reduces manual effort, allowing effective part segmentation with minimal labeled data. We demonstrate the efficacy of Guided SAM on a dataset of car parts, improving the average IoU on state of the art models from 0.37 to 0.49 with annotations that are on average five times more efficient to acquire.