# Rein++: Efficient Generalization and Adaptation for Semantic Segmentation with Vision Foundation Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.01667 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.01667/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 103 of its 127 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Aug 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 103)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.08361/) (2020)
- [MobileNetV2: Inverted Residuals and Linear Bottlenecks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04381/) (2018)
- [The Cityscapes Dataset for Semantic Urban Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.01685/) (2016)
- [Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning for NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.00751/) (2019)
- [The Power of Scale for Parameter-Efficient Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08691/) (2021)
- [Encoder-Decoder with Atrous Separable Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.02611/) (2018)
- [Domain-Adversarial Training of Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.07818/) (2015)
- [SegFormer: Simple and Efficient Design for Semantic Segmentation with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.15203/) (2021)
- [Benchmarking Neural Network Robustness to Common Corruptions and Perturbations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.12261/) (2019)
- [SAM 2: Segment Anything in Images and Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00714/) (2024)
- [InternVL: Scaling up Vision Foundation Models and Aligning for Generic Visual-Linguistic Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14238/) (2023)
- [Masked-attention Mask Transformer for Universal Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01527/) (2021)
- [Visual Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12119/) (2022)
- [BDD100K: A Diverse Driving Dataset for Heterogeneous Multitask Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.04687/) (2018)
- [Unified Perceptual Parsing for Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.10221/) (2018)
- [BitFit: Simple Parameter-efficient Fine-tuning for Transformer-based Masked Language-models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.10199/) (2021)
- [Per-Pixel Classification is Not All You Need for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.06278/) (2021)
- [ShuffleNet V2: Practical Guidelines for Efficient CNN Architecture Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.11164/) (2018)
- [Vision Transformers Need Registers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16588/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [LiDAS: Lighting-driven Dynamic Active Sensing for Nighttime Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.08912/) (2025)
- [TC-ADA: One-Shot Active Domain Adaptation for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.33432/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Vision Foundation Models(VFMs) have achieved remarkable success in various computer vision tasks. However, their application to semantic segmentation is hindered by two significant challenges: (1) the disparity in data scale, as segmentation datasets are typically much smaller than those used for VFM pre-training, and (2) domain distribution shifts, where real-world segmentation scenarios are diverse and often underrepresented during pre-training. To overcome these limitations, we present Rein++, an efficient VFM-based segmentation framework that demonstrates superior generalization from limited data and enables effective adaptation to diverse unlabeled scenarios. Specifically, Rein++ comprises a domain generalization solution Rein-G and a domain adaptation solution Rein-A. Rein-G introduces a set of trainable, instance-aware tokens that effectively refine the VFM's features for the segmentation task. This parameter-efficient approach fine-tunes less than 1% of the backbone's parameters, enabling robust generalization. Building on the Rein-G, Rein-A performs unsupervised domain adaptation at both the instance and logit levels to mitigate domain shifts. In addition, it incorporates a semantic transfer module that leverages the class-agnostic capabilities of the segment anything model to enhance boundary details in the target domain. The integrated Rein++ pipeline first learns a generalizable model on a source domain (e.g., daytime scenes) and subsequently adapts it to diverse target domains (e.g., nighttime scenes) without any target labels. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that Rein++ significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods with efficient training, underscoring its roles an efficient, generalizable, and adaptive segmentation solution for VFMs, even for large models with billions of parameters. The code is available at https://github.com/wloves/Rein.