# DeCoDrift: Stabilizing Decoder Coupling in Closed-Loop Foundation Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.25730 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.25730/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 24 of its 34 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 May 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 24 of 24)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [Neural Ordinary Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.07366/) (2018)
- [SAM 2: Segment Anything in Images and Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00714/) (2024)
- [Masked-attention Mask Transformer for Universal Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01527/) (2021)
- [Visual Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12119/) (2022)
- [What Does BERT Look At? An Analysis of BERT's Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.04341/) (2019)
- [Quantifying Attention Flow in Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00928/) (2020)
- [Transformer Interpretability Beyond Attention Visualization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09838/) (2020)
- [Train faster, generalize better: Stability of stochastic gradient descent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1509.01240/) (2015)
- [Medical SAM Adapter: Adapting Segment Anything Model for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.12620/) (2023)
- [XMem: Long-Term Video Object Segmentation with an Atkinson-Shiffrin Memory Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.07115/) (2022)
- [Video Object Segmentation using Space-Time Memory Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.00607/) (2019)
- [Segment Anything in High Quality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.01567/) (2023)
- [Segment Anything Model for Medical Image Analysis: an Experimental Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.10517/) (2023)
- [Personalize Segment Anything Model with One Shot](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.03048/) (2023)
- [Track Anything: Segment Anything Meets Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.11968/) (2023)
- [Reviving Iterative Training with Mask Guidance for Interactive Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.06583/) (2021)
- [Segment Anything Model (SAM) for Digital Pathology: Assess Zero-shot Segmentation on Whole Slide Imaging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.04155/) (2023)
- [Stable Recurrent Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.10369/) (2018)
- [Superhuman Accuracy on the SNEMI3D Connectomics Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.00120/) (2017)
- [Robustness of SAM: Segment Anything Under Corruptions and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.07713/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Foundation segmentation models such as Segment Anything Model (SAM) are now routinely used in iterative pipelines, where each predicted mask is fed back as the next prompt. This practice turns segmentation into a closed-loop dynamical process, yet the decoder-level behavior of these systems remains largely unexamined. We show that this feedback loop can induce a previously overlooked failure mode, decoder coupling drift, in which the mask decoder's cross-attention progressively loses alignment with the target object, causing errors to accumulate across iterations. We study this phenomenon by instrumenting SAM's mask decoder and deriving ground-truth-free measures of prompt-image coupling, attention stability, and temporal consistency. On volumetric electron microscopy data, these decoder-internal signals reveal that standard iterative prompting systematically degrades attention alignment and temporal coherence relative to oracle-anchored feedback. We then formalize iterative prompting as a discrete-time dynamical system and show how proximal anchoring reduces error amplification in the feedback loop. Building on this analysis, we introduce DeCoDrift, a training-free inference-time stabilization framework that constrains prompt updates and preserves decoder coupling across iterations. Across extensive experiments, DeCoDrift consistently improves attention stability, temporal coherence, and segmentation quality over standard iterative prompting, without retraining or ground-truth supervision. More broadly, our results show that decoder-internal dynamics are not merely diagnostic: they provide actionable signals for stabilizing foundation segmentation models in closed-loop use.