# CLIP-Guided SAM: Parameter-Efficient Semantic Conditioning for Promptable Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.24807 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.24807/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 42 of its 46 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 May 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 42)

- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning for NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.00751/) (2019)
- [The Power of Scale for Parameter-Efficient Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08691/) (2021)
- [Grounding DINO: Marrying DINO with Grounded Pre-Training for Open-Set Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05499/) (2023)
- [Grounded SAM: Assembling Open-World Models for Diverse Visual Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.14159/) (2024)
- [Open-vocabulary Object Detection via Vision and Language Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13921/) (2021)
- [SAM 3: Segment Anything with Concepts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.16719/) (2025)
- [Language-driven Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03546/) (2022)
- [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)
- [GroupViT: Semantic Segmentation Emerges from Text Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.11094/) (2022)
- [Scaling Open-Vocabulary Image Segmentation with Image-Level Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.12143/) (2021)
- [Anabranch Network for Camouflaged Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.09451/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Concealed Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.10274/) (2021)
- [Decoupling Zero-Shot Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.07910/) (2021)
- [PseudoSeg: Designing Pseudo Labels for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.09713/) (2020)
- [Revisiting Weak-to-Strong Consistency in Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.09910/) (2022)
- [ZegCLIP: Towards Adapting CLIP for Zero-shot Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.03588/) (2022)
- [SegCLIP: Patch Aggregation with Learnable Centers for Open-Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.14813/) (2022)
- [Learning to Generate Text-grounded Mask for Open-world Semantic Segmentation from Only Image-Text Pairs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.00785/) (2022)
- [ReCo: Retrieve and Co-segment for Zero-shot Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.07045/) (2022)
- [SAM-CLIP: Merging Vision Foundation Models towards Semantic and Spatial Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.15308/) (2023)
- [A Closer Look at the Explainability of Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.05653/) (2023)
- [Open-Vocabulary SAM: Segment and Recognize Twenty-thousand Classes Interactively](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.02955/) (2024)
- [Convolution Meets LoRA: Parameter Efficient Finetuning for Segment Anything Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.17868/) (2024)
- [UniMatch V2: Pushing the Limit of Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.10777/) (2024)
- [SAM Fails to Segment Anything? -- SAM-Adapter: Adapting SAM in Underperformed Scenes: Camouflage, Shadow, Medical Image Segmentation, and More](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.09148/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Promptable foundation models such as the Segment Anything Model (SAM) produce high-quality masks but remain semantically blind, relying on external prompts to specify categories. Existing vision-language approaches address this limitation by using external prompt coupling, where a vision-language model generates spatial prompts for SAM as a separate stage. We propose CLIP-Guided SAM, a parameter-efficient segmentation framework built on internal semantic conditioning. Instead of using semantic signals only to generate prompts, we inject CLIP-derived text, vision, and similarity features directly into SAM's image encoder through lightweight multi-modal semantic adapters. These adapters condition SAM's internal feature representations, allowing semantic information to influence mask prediction while preserving SAM's original promptable interface. Our framework is designed for low labeled-data settings and applies to both general-domain benchmarks and specialized downstream tasks. It supports two operating modes: Manual mode, for interactive segmentation with both text and spatial prompts, and Semi-Automatic text-only mode, for applications that require concept-specific segmentation using only textual input. We show that robustness depends on aligning training with the type of prompts used at inference, making train-test prompt consistency an important design principle. Through extensive experiments and ablations, we evaluate our method against SAM+PEFT baselines without semantic conditioning, vision-language + SAM pipelines, SAM 3, and strong semi-supervised segmentation methods that rely on large amounts of unlabeled data. Across these settings, CLIP-Guided SAM consistently achieves superior or competitive performance while remaining parameter-efficient in both training and deployment.