# Hybrid Global-Local Representation with Augmented Spatial Guidance for Zero-Shot Referring Image Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.00356 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.00356/

## Key facts

- Cited by 14 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 36 of its 45 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Apr 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 36)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [Grad-CAM: Visual Explanations from Deep Networks via Gradient-based Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02391/) (2016)
- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [On the Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07258/) (2021)
- [SAM 2: Segment Anything in Images and Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00714/) (2024)
- [CoCa: Contrastive Captioners are Image-Text Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01917/) (2022)
- [Generation and Comprehension of Unambiguous Object Descriptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.02283/) (2015)
- [Extract Free Dense Labels from CLIP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01071/) (2021)
- [Segment Everything Everywhere All at Once](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.06718/) (2023)
- [Segmentation from Natural Language Expressions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.06180/) (2016)
- [Modeling Context Between Objects for Referring Expression Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.00525/) (2016)
- [Track Anything: Segment Anything Meets Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.11968/) (2023)
- [Segment Anything Model (SAM) for Digital Pathology: Assess Zero-shot Segmentation on Whole Slide Imaging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.04155/) (2023)
- [Matcher: Segment Anything with One Shot Using All-Purpose Feature Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13310/) (2023)
- [ReCLIP: A Strong Zero-Shot Baseline for Referring Expression Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.05991/) (2022)
- [PhraseCut: Language-based Image Segmentation in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.01187/) (2020)
- [FreeSOLO: Learning to Segment Objects without Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.12181/) (2022)
- [Grounding Everything: Emerging Localization Properties in Vision-Language Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00878/) (2023)
- [Pay Attention to Your Neighbours: Training-Free Open-Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.08181/) (2024)
- [Rotated Multi-Scale Interaction Network for Referring Remote Sensing Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.12470/) (2023)
- [CLIP as RNN: Segment Countless Visual Concepts without Training Endeavor](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.07661/) (2023)
- [Zero-shot Referring Image Segmentation with Global-Local Context Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17811/) (2023)
- [Mask Grounding for Referring Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.12198/) (2023)
- [Edit Everything: A Text-Guided Generative System for Images Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.14006/) (2023)
- [Ref-Diff: Zero-shot Referring Image Segmentation with Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.16777/) (2023)
- [Learning Visual Grounding from Generative Vision and Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.14563/) (2024)
- [Curriculum Point Prompting for Weakly-Supervised Referring Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.11998/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [Image Generators are Generalist Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.20329/) (2026)
- [Multimodal Referring Segmentation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.00265/) (2025)
- [Evolving, Not Training: Zero-Shot Reasoning Segmentation via Evolutionary Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.24702/) (2025)
- [RefAM: Attention Magnets for Zero-Shot Referral Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.22650/) (2025)
- [Omni-Referring Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.06862/) (2025)
- [DressWild: Feed-Forward Pose-Agnostic Garment Sewing Pattern Generation from In-the-Wild Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.16502/) (2026)
- [RIS-LAD: A Benchmark and Model for Referring Low-Altitude Drone Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.20920/) (2025)
- [Layover or Direct Flight: Rethinking Audio-Guided Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.22025/) (2025)
- [Tarot-SAM3: Training-free SAM3 for Any Referring Expression Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.07916/) (2026)
- [Early Semantic Grounding in Image Editing Models for Zero-Shot Referring Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.13122/) (2026)
- [DGL-RSIS: Decoupling Global Spatial Context and Local Class Semantics for Training-Free Remote Sensing Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.00598/) (2025)
- [Spatial-aware Symmetric Alignment for Text-guided Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.22981/) (2025)
- [Learning to Label: A Reinforced Self-Evolving Framework for Semi-supervised Referring Expression Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.28239/) (2026)
- [AeroReformer2: Spoken-Query Referring Segmentation for Aerial Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.08874/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent advances in zero-shot referring image segmentation (RIS), driven by models such as the Segment Anything Model (SAM) and CLIP, have made substantial progress in aligning visual and textual information. Despite these successes, the extraction of precise and high-quality mask region representations remains a critical challenge, limiting the full potential of RIS tasks. In this paper, we introduce a training-free, hybrid global-local feature extraction approach that integrates detailed mask-specific features with contextual information from the surrounding area, enhancing mask region representation. To further strengthen alignment between mask regions and referring expressions, we propose a spatial guidance augmentation strategy that improves spatial coherence, which is essential for accurately localizing described areas. By incorporating multiple spatial cues, this approach facilitates more robust and precise referring segmentation. Extensive experiments on standard RIS benchmarks demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms existing zero-shot RIS models, achieving substantial performance gains. We believe our approach advances RIS tasks and establishes a versatile framework for region-text alignment, offering broader implications for cross-modal understanding and interaction. Code is available at https://github.com/fhgyuanshen/HybridGL .