Diffuse2Seg: Diffusion Models Can Segment Anything Without Supervision
Christoph Hümmer, Joachim Sicking, Fabian Hüger, Hanno Gottschalk
Abstract
Open-world entity segmentation aims to predict masks for arbitrary objects across domains and at multiple granularities, from parts to whole objects. In this setting, SAM sets a strong standard: trained on SA-1B, comprising 11M images and over 1B carefully annotated masks, it achieves remarkable zero-shot performance. Collecting such labels is expensive and time-consuming, however, which limits how far this recipe can scale. Text-to-image diffusion models offer a way around this. Their intermediate features transfer well across perception tasks, and since object structure emerges as the model denoises a noise sample into an image conditioned on a text prompt, that structure is already encoded in these representations. They can therefore be exploited for open-world entity segmentation without retraining or supervision. Building on this observation, we introduce Diffuse2Seg, which repurposes generative diffusion models for automatic mask generation by propagating a grid of point prompts through their self-attention representations in an edge-preserving manner. Diffuse2Seg produces multi-granular instance masks and outperforms prior state-of-the-art label generators by 4.3-7.1 p.p. in AR_1000 across five domains. Training an instance segmentation model on these generated masks advances detector-free open-world segmentation by 7.4 and 7.7 p.p. on "things" and "stuff+things" datasets and surpasses the detector-based UnSAM on "stuff+things" by 2.1 p.p. in AR_1000. Finally, we show that a model trained on Diffuse2Seg labels provides a strong initialization for semi-supervised learning, outperforming its fully supervised counterpart with already 5k labeled images.