A Surprisingly Simple Approach to Generalized Few-Shot Semantic Segmentation

Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37 (NeurIPS 2024) Main Conference Track

Bibtex Paper

Authors

Tomoya Sakai, Haoxiang Qiu, Takayuki Katsuki, Daiki Kimura, Takayuki Osogami, Tadanobu Inoue

Abstract

The goal of *generalized* few-shot semantic segmentation (GFSS) is to recognize *novel-class* objects through training with a few annotated examples and the *base-class* model that learned the knowledge about the base classes.Unlike the classic few-shot semantic segmentation, GFSS aims to classify pixels into both base and novel classes, meaning it is a more practical setting.Current GFSS methods rely on several techniques such as using combinations of customized modules, carefully designed loss functions, meta-learning, and transductive learning.However, we found that a simple rule and standard supervised learning substantially improve the GFSS performance.In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective method for GFSS that does not use the techniques mentioned above.Also, we theoretically show that our method perfectly maintains the segmentation performance of the base-class model over most of the base classes.Through numerical experiments, we demonstrated the effectiveness of our method.It improved in novel-class segmentation performance in the $1$-shot scenario by $6.1$% on the PASCAL-$5^i$ dataset, $4.7$% on the PASCAL-$10^i$ dataset, and $1.0$% on the COCO-$20^i$ dataset.Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/IBM/BCM.