SCALER: SAM-Enhanced Collaborative Learning for Label-Deficient Concealed Object Segmentation

Existing methods for label-deficient concealed object segmentation (LDCOS) either rely on consistency constraints or Segment Anything Model (SAM)-based pseudo-labeling. However, their performance remains limited due to the intrinsic concealment of targets and the scarcity of annotations. This study investigates two key questions: (1) Can consistency constraints and SAM-based supervision be jointly integrated to better exploit complementary information and enhance the segmenter? and (2) beyond that, can the segmenter in turn guide SAM through reciprocal supervision, enabling mutual improvement? To answer these questions, we present SCALER, a unified collaborative framework toward LDCOS that jointly optimizes a mean-teacher segmenter and a learnable SAM. SCALER operates in two alternating phases. In textbfPhase uppercaseexpandafterromannumeral1, the segmenter is optimized under fixed SAM supervision using entropy-based image-level and uncertainty-based pixel-level weighting to select reliable pseudo-label regions and emphasize harder examples. In textbfPhase uppercaseexpandafterromannumeral2, SAM is updated via augmentation invariance and noise resistance losses, leveraging its inherent robustness to perturbations. Experiments demonstrate that SCALER yields consistent performance gains across eight semi- and weakly-supervised COS tasks. The results further suggest that SCALER can serve as a general training paradigm to enhance both lightweight segmenters and large foundation models under label-scarce conditions. Code will be released.