# Localized Region Guidance for Class Activation Mapping in WSSS

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.12496 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.12496/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 25 of its 43 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Sep 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 25 of 25)

- [Grad-CAM: Visual Explanations from Deep Networks via Gradient-based Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02391/) (2016)
- [Learning Deep Features for Discriminative Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.04150/) (2015)
- [Understanding Black-box Predictions via Influence Functions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.04730/) (2017)
- [Score-CAM: Score-Weighted Visual Explanations for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.01279/) (2019)
- [Self-supervised Equivariant Attention Mechanism for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04581/) (2020)
- [Influence Functions in Deep Learning Are Fragile](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.14651/) (2020)
- [Weakly Supervised Learning of Instance Segmentation with Inter-pixel Relations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05044/) (2019)
- [Causal Intervention for Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.12547/) (2020)
- [FickleNet: Weakly and Semi-supervised Semantic Image Segmentation using Stochastic Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.10421/) (2019)
- [Axiom-based Grad-CAM: Towards Accurate Visualization and Explanation of CNNs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.02312/) (2020)
- [Anti-Adversarially Manipulated Attributions for Weakly and Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.08896/) (2021)
- [Constrained Convolutional Neural Networks for Weakly Supervised Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.03648/) (2015)
- [Reliability Does Matter: An End-to-End Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.08039/) (2019)
- [Self-supervised Image-specific Prototype Exploration for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02909/) (2022)
- [Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation by Pixel-to-Prototype Contrast](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07110/) (2021)
- [CIAN: Cross-Image Affinity Net for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.10842/) (2018)
- [Complementary Patch for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.03852/) (2021)
- [Class Re-Activation Maps for Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00962/) (2022)
- [Interpreting Black Box Predictions using Fisher Kernels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.10118/) (2018)
- [Universal Weakly Supervised Segmentation by Pixel-to-Segment Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.00957/) (2021)
- [Threshold Matters in WSSS: Manipulating the Activation for the Robust and Accurate Segmentation Model Against Thresholds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16045/) (2022)
- [Expansion and Shrinkage of Localization for Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.07761/) (2022)
- [Extracting Class Activation Maps from Non-Discriminative Features as well](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.10334/) (2023)
- [Mixup-CAM: Weakly-supervised Semantic Segmentation via Uncertainty Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.01201/) (2020)
- [SFC: Shared Feature Calibration in Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.11719/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [DualProtoSeg: Simple and Efficient Design with Text- and Image-Guided Prototype Learning for Weakly Supervised Histopathology Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.10314/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation (WSSS) addresses the challenge of training segmentation models using only image-level annotations. Existing WSSS methods struggle with precise object boundary localization and focus only on the most discriminative regions. To address these challenges, we propose IG-CAM (Instance-Guided Class Activation Mapping), a novel approach that leverages instance-level cues and influence functions to generate high-quality, boundary-aware localization maps. Our method introduces three key innovations: (1) Instance-Guided Refinement using object proposals to guide CAM generation, ensuring complete object coverage; (2) Influence Function Integration that captures the relationship between training samples and model predictions; and (3) Multi-Scale Boundary Enhancement with progressive refinement strategies. IG-CAM achieves state-of-the-art performance on PASCAL VOC 2012 with 82.3% mIoU before post-processing, improving to 86.6% after CRF refinement, significantly outperforming previous WSSS methods. Extensive ablation studies validate each component's contribution, establishing IG-CAM as a new benchmark for weakly supervised semantic segmentation.