# VIP: Visual-guided Prompt Evolution for Efficient Dense Vision-Language Inference

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.12325 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.12325/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 60 of its 70 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 May 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 60)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [The Cityscapes Dataset for Semantic Urban Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.01685/) (2016)
- [Gemini 2.5: Pushing the Frontier with Advanced Reasoning, Multimodality, Long Context, and Next Generation Agentic Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.06261/) (2025)
- [Scaling Up Visual and Vision-Language Representation Learning With Noisy Text Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05918/) (2021)
- [Sigmoid Loss for Language Image Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15343/) (2023)
- [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)
- [DINOv3](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10104/) (2025)
- [Energy-based Out-of-distribution Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.03759/) (2020)
- [CoCa: Contrastive Captioners are Image-Text Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01917/) (2022)
- [SigLIP 2: Multilingual Vision-Language Encoders with Improved Semantic Understanding, Localization, and Dense Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.14786/) (2025)
- [Reproducible scaling laws for contrastive language-image learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.07143/) (2022)
- [Semantic Understanding of Scenes through the ADE20K Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.05442/) (2016)
- [COCO-Stuff: Thing and Stuff Classes in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03716/) (2016)
- [Extract Free Dense Labels from CLIP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01071/) (2021)
- [Open-Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation with Mask-adapted CLIP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.04150/) (2022)
- [Visual Classification via Description from Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.07183/) (2022)
- [What does a platypus look like? Generating customized prompts for zero-shot image classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.03320/) (2022)
- [iSAID: A Large-scale Dataset for Instance Segmentation in Aerial Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.12886/) (2019)
- [SCLIP: Rethinking Self-Attention for Dense Vision-Language Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.01597/) (2023)
- [Single-Stage Semantic Segmentation from Image Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.08104/) (2020)
- [Open-Vocabulary Universal Image Segmentation with MaskCLIP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.08984/) (2022)
- [Learning to Generate Text-grounded Mask for Open-world Semantic Segmentation from Only Image-Text Pairs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.00785/) (2022)

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

- [Prompt-Calibrated SAM 3 for Open-Vocabulary Remote Sensing Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.21863/) (2026)
- [TAG: Calibrating SAM3 for Universal Image Segmentation without Dense Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.14651/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Pursuing training-free open-vocabulary semantic segmentation in an efficient and generalizable manner remains challenging due to the deep-seated spatial bias in CLIP. To overcome the limitations of existing solutions, this work moves beyond the CLIP-based paradigm and harnesses the recent spatially-aware dino.txt framework to facilitate more efficient and high-quality dense prediction. While dino.txt exhibits robust spatial awareness, we find that the semantic ambiguity of text queries gives rise to severe mismatch within its dense cross-modal interactions. To address this, we introduce Visual-guided Prompt evolution (VIP) to rectify the semantic expressiveness of text queries in dino.txt, unleashing its potential for fine-grained object perception. Towards this end, VIP integrates alias expansion with a visual-guided distillation mechanism to mine valuable semantic cues, which are robustly aggregated in a saliency-aware manner to yield a high-fidelity prediction. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that VIP: 1. surpasses the top-leading methods by 1.4%-8.4% average mIoU, 2. generalizes well to diverse challenging domains, and 3. requires marginal inference time and memory overhead.