English

Lightweight Transformer Framework for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2025-11-26 v1

Abstract

Weakly supervised semantic segmentation (WSSS) must learn dense masks from noisy, under-specified cues. We revisit the SegFormer decoder and show that three small, synergistic changes make weak supervision markedly more effective-without altering the MiT backbone or relying on heavy post-processing. Our method, CrispFormer, augments the decoder with: (1) a boundary branch that supervises thin object contours using a lightweight edge head and a boundary-aware loss; (2) an uncertainty-guided refiner that predicts per-pixel aleatoric uncertainty and uses it to weight losses and gate a residual correction of the segmentation logits; and (3) a dynamic multi-scale fusion layer that replaces static concatenation with spatial softmax gating over multi-resolution features, optionally modulated by uncertainty. The result is a single-pass model that preserves crisp boundaries, selects appropriate scales per location, and resists label noise from weak cues. Integrated into a standard WSSS pipeline (seed, student, and EMA relabeling), CrispFormer consistently improves boundary F-score, small-object recall, and mIoU over SegFormer baselines trained on the same seeds, while adding minimal compute. Our decoder-centric formulation is simple to implement, broadly compatible with existing SegFormer variants, and offers a reproducible path to higher-fidelity masks from image-level supervision.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2511.19765,
  title  = {Lightweight Transformer Framework for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation},
  author = {Ali Torabi and Sanjog Gaihre and Yaqoob Majeed},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2511.19765},
  year   = {2025}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T07:53:16.817Z