mlsanityData to 13 Oct 2026

Exploring the Underwater World Segmentation without Extra Training

arXiv 2511.07923 ↗First posted 11 Nov 2025cs.CV cs.AIcited by 16

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Abstract (arXiv)

Accurate segmentation of marine organisms is vital for biodiversity monitoring and ecological assessment, yet existing datasets and models remain largely limited to terrestrial scenes. To bridge this gap, we introduce AquaOV255, the first large-scale and fine-grained underwater segmentation dataset containing 255 categories and over 20K images, covering diverse categories for open-vocabulary (OV) evaluation. Furthermore, we establish the first underwater OV segmentation benchmark, UOVSBench, by integrating AquaOV255 with five additional underwater datasets to enable comprehensive evaluation. Alongside, we present Earth2Ocean, a training-free OV segmentation framework that transfers terrestrial vision--language models (VLMs) to underwater domains without any additional underwater training. Earth2Ocean consists of two core components: a Geometric-guided Visual Mask Generator (GMG) that refines visual features via self-similarity geometric priors for local structure perception, and a Category-visual Semantic Alignment (CSA) module that enhances text embeddings through multimodal large language model reasoning and scene-aware template construction. Extensive experiments on the UOVSBench benchmark demonstrate that Earth2Ocean achieves significant performance improvement on average while maintaining efficient inference.

Key facts. Cited by 16 papers in the map (data through 13 Oct 2026). Builds on 44 of its 61 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 11 Nov 2025.

Builds on

44 of 61 references.

References · 44

  1. 2021Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervisioncited by 33,588
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  4. 2025Qwen3 Technical Reportcited by 8,510
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  12. 2024SAM 2: Segment Anything in Images and Videoscited by 2,820
32 more
  1. 2024Depth Anything V2cited by 1,399
  2. 2022DINO: DETR with Improved DeNoising Anchor Boxes for End-to-End Object Detectioncited by 1,312
  3. 2021Extract Free Dense Labels from CLIPcited by 582
  4. 2019An Underwater Image Enhancement Benchmark Dataset and Beyondcited by 250
  5. 2023SCLIP: Rethinking Self-Attention for Dense Vision-Language Inferencecited by 170
  6. 2024ClearCLIP: Decomposing CLIP Representations for Dense Vision-Language Inferencecited by 113
  7. 2017WaterGAN: Unsupervised Generative Network to Enable Real-time Color Correction of Monocular Underwater Imagescited by 112
  8. 2024ProxyCLIP: Proxy Attention Improves CLIP for Open-Vocabulary Segmentationcited by 111
  9. 2023A Closer Look at the Explainability of Contrastive Language-Image Pre-trainingcited by 96
  10. 2020Semantic Segmentation of Underwater Imagery: Dataset and Benchmarkcited by 95
  11. 2024Pay Attention to Your Neighbours: Training-Free Open-Vocabulary Semantic Segmentationcited by 77
  12. 2023Diffusion Model is Secretly a Training-free Open Vocabulary Semantic Segmentercited by 76
  13. 2023CLIP as RNN: Segment Countless Visual Concepts without Training Endeavorcited by 69
  14. 2023Diffusion Models for Open-Vocabulary Segmentationcited by 64
  15. 2024Training-Free Open-Vocabulary Segmentation with Offline Diffusion-Augmented Prototype Generationcited by 44
  16. 2024EmerDiff: Emerging Pixel-level Semantic Knowledge in Diffusion Modelscited by 42
  17. 2024Harnessing Vision Foundation Models for High-Performance, Training-Free Open Vocabulary Segmentationcited by 39
  18. 2024In Defense of Lazy Visual Grounding for Open-Vocabulary Semantic Segmentationcited by 38
  19. 2024Self-Calibrated CLIP for Training-Free Open-Vocabulary Segmentationcited by 34
  20. 2024Diving into Underwater: Segment Anything Model Guided Underwater Salient Instance Segmentation and A Large-scale Datasetcited by 33
  21. 2025Exploring Efficient Open-Vocabulary Segmentation in the Remote Sensingcited by 31
  22. 2024Unsupervised Hyperspectral Image Super-Resolution via Self-Supervised Modality Decouplingcited by 26
  23. 2024Distilling Spectral Graph for Object-Context Aware Open-Vocabulary Semantic Segmentationcited by 24
  24. 2023MarineGPT: Unlocking Secrets of Ocean to the Publiccited by 23
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  28. 2025USIS16K: High-Quality Dataset for Underwater Salient Instance Segmentationcited by 10
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  31. 2023MarineDet: Towards Open-Marine Object Detectioncited by 5
  32. 2025Training Data Provenance Verification: Did Your Model Use Synthetic Data from My Generative Model for Training?cited by 4

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Cited by year (2026 to 13 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 16.

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  1. 2026Pansharpening for Thin-Cloud Contaminated Remote Sensing Images: A Unified Framework and Benchmark Datasetcited by 5
  2. 2026TDEC: Deep Embedded Image Clustering with Transformer and Distribution Informationcited by 3
  3. 2026Perturbation-Regularized Open-Vocabulary Remote Sensing Segmentation with Unified Multi-Domain Evaluationcited by 2
  4. 2026CNMBI: Determining the Number of Clusters Using Center Pairwise Matching and Boundary Filteringcited by 1
  5. 2026Deep Image Clustering Based on Curriculum Learning and Density Informationcited by 1
  6. 2026An Open-Source Benchmark and Baseline for Multi-temporal Referring Segmentationcited by 1
  7. 2026UW-VOS: A Large-Scale Dataset for Underwater Video Object Segmentationcited by 0
  8. 2026ShellfishNet: A Domain-Specific Benchmark for Visual Recognition of Marine Molluscscited by 0
  9. 2026Conformal Risk Prediction for Non-Alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease Using Gradient Boosting with Distribution-Free Coveragescited by 0
  10. 2026VigilFormer: Deformable Attention for Video Anomaly Detection with Causal Risk Inferencecited by 0
  11. 2026Bridging Geographic Bias in Urban Streetscape Inference via Lifelong Learning with Visual-Semantic Pivotingcited by 0
  12. 2026URDF Synthesis from RGB-D Sequences via Differentiable Joint Inference and Energy-Consistent Verificationcited by 0
4 more
  1. 2026Cross-Modal Hierarchical Fusion for from Multi-Sensor Ground Observationcited by 0
  2. 2026MarineEVT: Advancing Event-Centric Marine Video Understanding via Visual Tool Reasoningcited by 0
  3. 2026GeoSeg-OV: Bridging Geospatial Gaps with Structural Guidance for Open-Vocabulary Remote Sensing Segmentationcited by 0
  4. 2026A Multi-Annotator Study of Segmentation Noise and Uncertainty in Turbid Underwater Imagescited by 0

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2025UWBench: A Comprehensive Vision-Language Benchmark for Underwater Understanding
  2. 2025AquaticCLIP: A Vision-Language Foundation Model for Underwater Scene Analysis
  3. 2025Marine Saliency Segmenter: Object-Focused Conditional Diffusion with Region-Level Semantic Knowledge Distillation
  4. 2024Composing Open-domain Vision with RAG for Ocean Monitoring and Conservation
  5. 2026Evaluation of Vision-Language Models Across Diverse Coastal Environments
  6. 2025NAUTILUS: A Large Multimodal Model for Underwater Scene Understanding
  7. 2025FishNet++: Analyzing the capabilities of Multimodal Large Language Models in marine biology
  8. 2026OceanPile: A Large-Scale Multimodal Ocean Corpus for Foundation Models