# MARIS: Marine Open-Vocabulary Instance Segmentation with Geometric Enhancement and Semantic Alignment

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.15398 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.15398/

## Key facts

- Cited by 15 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 37 of its 59 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Oct 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 37)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [BLIP: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training for Unified Vision-Language Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12086/) (2022)
- [InstructBLIP: Towards General-purpose Vision-Language Models with Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06500/) (2023)
- [Depth Anything V2](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09414/) (2024)
- [Depth Anything: Unleashing the Power of Large-Scale Unlabeled Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10891/) (2024)
- [Per-Pixel Classification is Not All You Need for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.06278/) (2021)
- [Language-driven Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03546/) (2022)
- [Open-Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation with Mask-adapted CLIP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.04150/) (2022)
- [Open-Vocabulary Panoptic Segmentation with Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.04803/) (2023)
- [Side Adapter Network for Open-Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.12242/) (2023)
- [A Simple Baseline for Open-Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation with Pre-trained Vision-language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.14757/) (2021)
- [CAT-Seg: Cost Aggregation for Open-Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11797/) (2023)
- [Convolutions Die Hard: Open-Vocabulary Segmentation with Single Frozen Convolutional CLIP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.02487/) (2023)
- [MaskCLIP: Masked Self-Distillation Advances Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.12262/) (2022)
- [SED: A Simple Encoder-Decoder for Open-Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.15537/) (2023)
- [Semantic Segmentation of Underwater Imagery: Dataset and Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.01241/) (2020)
- [FreeSeg: Unified, Universal and Open-Vocabulary Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17225/) (2023)
- [Open-Vocabulary Segmentation with Semantic-Assisted Calibration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.04089/) (2023)
- [Collaborative Vision-Text Representation Optimizing for Open-Vocabulary Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00744/) (2024)
- [Open-Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation with Image Embedding Balancing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09829/) (2024)
- [Diving into Underwater: Segment Anything Model Guided Underwater Salient Instance Segmentation and A Large-scale Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.06039/) (2024)
- [Fine-Grained Preference Optimization Improves Spatial Reasoning in VLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.21656/) (2025)
- [Unsupervised Hyperspectral Image Super-Resolution via Self-Supervised Modality Decoupling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.04802/) (2024)
- [Cross from Left to Right Brain: Adaptive Text Dreamer for Vision-and-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.20897/) (2025)
- [U3M: Unbiased Multiscale Modal Fusion Model for Multimodal Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.15365/) (2024)
- [USIS16K: High-Quality Dataset for Underwater Salient Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.19472/) (2025)
- [Generalization Boosted Adapter for Open-Vocabulary Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.08468/) (2024)
- [CaveSeg: Deep Semantic Segmentation and Scene Parsing for Autonomous Underwater Cave Exploration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.11038/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [PALM: Progress-Aware Policy Learning via Affordance Reasoning for Long-Horizon Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.07060/) (2026)
- [Exploring the Underwater World Segmentation without Extra Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.07923/) (2025)
- [The Second Challenge on Cross-Domain Few-Shot Object Detection at NTIRE 2026: Methods and Results](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.11998/) (2026)
- [When Models Learn to Ask Why: Adaptive Causal Reasoning for Trustworthy Medical Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.23085/) (2026)
- [Pansharpening for Thin-Cloud Contaminated Remote Sensing Images: A Unified Framework and Benchmark Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.14952/) (2026)
- [CNMBI: Determining the Number of Clusters Using Center Pairwise Matching and Boundary Filtering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.26744/) (2026)
- [An Open-Source Benchmark and Baseline for Multi-temporal Referring Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.00987/) (2026)
- [UW-VOS: A Large-Scale Dataset for Underwater Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.24006/) (2026)
- [The Devil Is in Gradient Entanglement: Energy-Aware Gradient Coordinator for Robust Generalized Category Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.14176/) (2026)
- [Detect in Any Scene: An Agentic Framework for Object Detection with Experience-Aware Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.31174/) (2026)
- [Conformal Risk Prediction for Non-Alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease Using Gradient Boosting with Distribution-Free Coverages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.09860/) (2026)
- [VigilFormer: Deformable Attention for Video Anomaly Detection with Causal Risk Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.14724/) (2026)
- [Bridging Geographic Bias in Urban Streetscape Inference via Lifelong Learning with Visual-Semantic Pivoting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.15055/) (2026)
- [URDF Synthesis from RGB-D Sequences via Differentiable Joint Inference and Energy-Consistent Verification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.18861/) (2026)
- [Cross-Modal Hierarchical Fusion for from Multi-Sensor Ground Observation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.30647/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Most existing underwater instance segmentation approaches are constrained by close-vocabulary prediction, limiting their ability to recognize novel marine categories. To support evaluation, we introduce MARIS (underlineMarine Open-Vocabulary underlineInstance underlineSegmentation), the first large-scale fine-grained benchmark for underwater Open-Vocabulary (OV) segmentation, featuring a limited set of seen categories and diverse unseen categories. Although OV segmentation has shown promise on natural images, our analysis reveals that transfer to underwater scenes suffers from severe visual degradation (e.g., color attenuation) and semantic misalignment caused by lack underwater class definitions. To address these issues, we propose a unified framework with two complementary components. The Geometric Prior Enhancement Module (GPEM) leverages stable part-level and structural cues to maintain object consistency under degraded visual conditions. The Semantic Alignment Injection Mechanism (SAIM) enriches language embeddings with domain-specific priors, mitigating semantic ambiguity and improving recognition of unseen categories. Experiments show that our framework consistently outperforms existing OV baselines both In-Domain and Cross-Domain setting on MARIS, establishing a strong foundation for future underwater perception research.