In plain words: A plain image-classification transformer can do segmentation directly, skipping the usual extra parts that build multi-scale features and draw masks. With enough size and pre-training it matches specialized pipelines' accuracy while running up to 4 times faster.
Abstract · Your ViT is Secretly an Image Segmentation Model
Vision Transformers (ViTs) have shown remarkable performance and scalability across various computer vision tasks. To apply single-scale ViTs to image segmentation, existing methods adopt a convolutional adapter to generate multi-scale features, a pixel decoder to fuse these features, and a Transformer decoder that uses the fused features to make predictions. In this paper, we show that the inductive biases introduced by these task-specific components can instead be learned by the ViT itself, given sufficiently large models and extensive pre-training. Based on these findings, we introduce the Encoder-only Mask Transformer (EoMT), which repurposes the plain ViT architecture to conduct image segmentation. With large-scale models and pre-training, EoMT obtains a segmentation accuracy similar to state-of-the-art models that use task-specific components. At the same time, EoMT is significantly faster than these methods due to its architectural simplicity, e.g., up to 4x faster with ViT-L. Across a range of model sizes, EoMT demonstrates an optimal balance between segmentation accuracy and prediction speed, suggesting that compute resources are better spent on scaling the ViT itself rather than adding architectural complexity. Code: https://www.tue-mps.org/eomt/.
Tommie Kerssies, Niccolò Cavagnero, Alexander Hermans, Narges Norouzi, Giuseppe Averta, Bastian Leibe, Gijs Dubbelman, Daan de Geus
arXiv:2503.19108 · cs.CV · submitted Mar 24, 2025
abstract · pdf · html · CVPR 2025. Code: https://www.tue-mps.org/eomt/