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VLSM-Adapter: Finetuning Vision-Language Segmentation Efficiently with Lightweight Blocks

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2024-06-28 v2 Artificial Intelligence Computation and Language Machine Learning

Abstract

Foundation Vision-Language Models (VLMs) trained using large-scale open-domain images and text pairs have recently been adapted to develop Vision-Language Segmentation Models (VLSMs) that allow providing text prompts during inference to guide image segmentation. If robust and powerful VLSMs can be built for medical images, it could aid medical professionals in many clinical tasks where they must spend substantial time delineating the target structure of interest. VLSMs for medical images resort to fine-tuning base VLM or VLSM pretrained on open-domain natural image datasets due to fewer annotated medical image datasets; this fine-tuning is resource-consuming and expensive as it usually requires updating all or a significant fraction of the pretrained parameters. Recently, lightweight blocks called adapters have been proposed in VLMs that keep the pretrained model frozen and only train adapters during fine-tuning, substantially reducing the computing resources required. We introduce a novel adapter, VLSM-Adapter, that can fine-tune pretrained vision-language segmentation models using transformer encoders. Our experiments in widely used CLIP-based segmentation models show that with only 3 million trainable parameters, the VLSM-Adapter outperforms state-of-the-art and is comparable to the upper bound end-to-end fine-tuning. The source code is available at: https://github.com/naamiinepal/vlsm-adapter.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2405.06196,
  title  = {VLSM-Adapter: Finetuning Vision-Language Segmentation Efficiently with Lightweight Blocks},
  author = {Manish Dhakal and Rabin Adhikari and Safal Thapaliya and Bishesh Khanal},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2405.06196},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

Accepted at MICCAI 2024, the 27th International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention

R2 v1 2026-06-28T16:22:47.865Z