Learning Open-vocabulary Semantic Segmentation Models From Natural Language Supervision

In this paper, we consider the problem of open-vocabulary semantic segmentation (OVS), which aims to segment objects of arbitrary classes instead of pre-defined, closed-set categories. The main contributions are as fol-lows: First , we propose a transformer-based model for OVS, termed as OVSegmentor, which only exploits web-crawled image-text pairs for pre-training without using any mask annotations. OVSegmentor assembles the image pixels into a set of learnable group tokens via a slot-attention based binding module, and aligns the group tokens to the corresponding caption embedding. Second , we propose two proxy tasks for training, namely masked entity completion and cross-image mask consistency. The former aims to infer all masked entities in the caption given the group tokens, that enables the model to learn fine-grained alignment between visual groups and text entities. The latter enforces consistent mask predictions between images that contain shared entities, which encourages the model to learn visual invariance. Third , we construct CC4M dataset for pre-training by filtering CC12M with frequently appeared entities, which significantly improves training efficiency. Fourth , we perform zero-shot transfer on three benchmark datasets, PASCAL VOC 2012, PASCAL Context, and COCO Object. Our model achieves superior segmentation results over the state-of-the-art method by using only 3% data (4M vs 134M) for pre-training. Code and pre-trained models will be released for future research.