# Induce to Empower: Improving Lightweight Baselines via Foundation Model Induction for Generalized Polyp Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.17208 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.17208/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 21 of its 30 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Jul 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [Masked-attention Mask Transformer for Universal Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01527/) (2021)
- [UNet++: A Nested U-Net Architecture for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.10165/) (2018)
- [Per-Pixel Classification is Not All You Need for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.06278/) (2021)
- [Kvasir-SEG: A Segmented Polyp Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.07069/) (2019)
- [PraNet: Parallel Reverse Attention Network for Polyp Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11392/) (2020)
- [UNet 3+: A Full-Scale Connected UNet for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.08790/) (2020)
- [OneFormer: One Transformer to Rule Universal Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.06220/) (2022)
- [MambaVision: A Hybrid Mamba-Transformer Vision Backbone](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.08083/) (2024)
- [A Benchmark for Endoluminal Scene Segmentation of Colonoscopy Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00799/) (2016)
- [Polyp-PVT: Polyp Segmentation with Pyramid Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.06932/) (2021)
- [Shallow Attention Network for Polyp Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.00882/) (2021)
- [Automatic Polyp Segmentation via Multi-scale Subtraction Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05082/) (2021)
- [MEGANet: Multi-Scale Edge-Guided Attention Network for Weak Boundary Polyp Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.03329/) (2023)
- [SAM-Mamba: Mamba Guided SAM Architecture for Generalized Zero-Shot Polyp Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.08482/) (2024)
- [From SAM to DINOv2: Towards Distilling Foundation Models to Lightweight Baselines for Generalized Polyp Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.09307/) (2025)
- [Mamba Guided Boundary Prior Matters: A New Perspective for Generalized Polyp Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.01509/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Automated polyp segmentation in colonoscopy continues to pose challenges due to substantial appearance variations and indistinct polyp boundaries. Although emerging foundation models (FMs) such as DINOv2, SAM, and OneFormer, demonstrate remarkable generalization capabilities, their direct transfer to the polyp segmentation task and deployment in real-time clinical settings are difficult due to lack of large-scale labeled data and high computational demands. In addition, adopting multiple FMs together raises concerns, even though they encode complementary semantic and structural information. While lightweight models, including U-Net, PraNet and U-Net++, are computationally efficient, they often struggle to generalize across datasets due to limited representational capacity. To address this gap, we propose Lite-Polyp Inductor (Lite-Pi), a novel foundation model induction framework that significantly enhances lightweight polyp segmentation baselines. Our proposed framework generates FM-specific prototype representations and aligns them semantically with the corresponding foundation model priors through reconstruction-based supervision. Subsequently, transformer-based fusion is introduced to highlight the polyp relevant representations, including salient boundary information, while preserving complementary semantic cues. Extensive experiments across five polyp segmentation benchmark datasets demonstrate that Lite-π significantly improves lightweight baselines, achieving superior generalization performance with minimal computational overhead and thereby, offering a practical solution for generalized polyp segmentation. Our code is available at GitHub. https://github.com/lostinrepo/Lite-Pi