Arrow Research search
Back to NeurIPS

NeurIPS 2023

SegRefiner: Towards Model-Agnostic Segmentation Refinement with Discrete Diffusion Process

Conference Paper Main Conference Track Artificial Intelligence ยท Machine Learning

Abstract

In this paper, we explore a principal way to enhance the quality of object masks produced by different segmentation models. We propose a model-agnostic solution called SegRefiner, which offers a novel perspective on this problem by interpreting segmentation refinement as a data generation process. As a result, the refinement process can be smoothly implemented through a series of denoising diffusion steps. Specifically, SegRefiner takes coarse masks as inputs and refines them using a discrete diffusion process. By predicting the label and corresponding states-transition probabilities for each pixel, SegRefiner progressively refines the noisy masks in a conditional denoising manner. To assess the effectiveness of SegRefiner, we conduct comprehensive experiments on various segmentation tasks, including semantic segmentation, instance segmentation, and dichotomous image segmentation. The results demonstrate the superiority of our SegRefiner from multiple aspects. Firstly, it consistently improves both the segmentation metrics and boundary metrics across different types of coarse masks. Secondly, it outperforms previous model-agnostic refinement methods by a significant margin. Lastly, it exhibits a strong capability to capture extremely fine details when refining high-resolution images. The source code and trained models are available at SegRefiner. git

Authors

Keywords

No keywords are indexed for this paper.

Context

Venue
Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems
Archive span
1987-2025
Indexed papers
30776
Paper id
1084514961008369135
v2026.09.13