OV-Stitcher: A Global Context-Aware Framework for Training-Free Open-Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation

A sliding-window inference strategy is commonly adopted in recent training-free open-vocabulary semantic segmentation methods to overcome limitation of the CLIP in processing high-resolution images. However, this approach introduces a new challenge: each window is processed independently, leading to semantic discrepancy across windows. To address this issue, we propose Global-Local Aligned CLIP~(GLA-CLIP), a framework that facilitates comprehensive information exchange across windows. Rather than limiting attention to tokens within individual windows, GLA-CLIP extends key-value tokens to incorporate contextual cues from all windows. Nevertheless, we observe a window bias: outer-window tokens are less likely to be attended, since query features are produced through interactions within the inner window patches, thereby lacking semantic grounding beyond their local context. To mitigate this, we introduce a proxy anchor, constructed by aggregating tokens highly similar to the given query from all windows, which provides a unified semantic reference for measuring similarity across both inner- and outer-window patches. Furthermore, we propose a dynamic normalization scheme that adjusts attention strength according to object scale by dynamically scaling and thresholding the attention map to cope with small-object scenarios. Moreover, GLA-CLIP can be equipped on existing methods and broad their receptive field. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of GLA-CLIP in enhancing training-free open-vocabulary semantic segmentation performance. Code is available at https://github.com/2btlFe/GLA-CLIP.

Open-vocabulary semantic segmentation (OVSS) aims to segment arbitrary category regions in images using open-vocabulary prompts, necessitating that existing methods possess pixel-level vision-language alignment capability. Typically, this capability involves computing the cosine similarity, \ie, logits, between visual and linguistic features, and minimizing the distribution discrepancy between the logits and the ground truth (GT) to generate optimal logits that are subsequently used to construct segmentation maps, yet it depends on time-consuming iterative training or model-specific attention modulation. In this work, we propose a more direct approach that eschews the logits-optimization process by directly deriving an analytic solution for the segmentation map. We posit a key hypothesis: the distribution discrepancy encodes semantic information; specifically, this discrepancy exhibits consistency across patches belonging to the same category but inconsistency across different categories. Based on this hypothesis, we directly utilize the analytic solution of this distribution discrepancy as the semantic maps. In other words, we reformulate the optimization of the distribution discrepancy as deriving its analytic solution, thereby eliminating time-consuming iterative training, freeing us from model-specific attention modulation, and achieving state-of-the-art performance on eight benchmark datasets.

Open-Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation (OVSS) assigns pixel-level labels from an open set of text-defined categories, demanding reliable generalization to unseen classes at inference. Although modern vision-language models (VLMs) support strong open-vocabulary recognition, their representations learned through global contrastive objectives remain suboptimal for dense prediction, prompting many OVSS methods to depend on limited adaptation or refinement of image-text similarity maps. This, in turn, restricts spatial precision and robustness in complex, cluttered scenes. We introduce dinov3.seg, extending dinov3.txt into a dedicated framework for OVSS. Our contributions are four-fold. First, we design a task-specific architecture tailored to this backbone, systematically adapting established design principles from prior open-vocabulary segmentation work. Second, we jointly leverage text embeddings aligned with both the global [CLS] token and local patch-level visual features from ViT-based encoder, effectively combining semantic discrimination with fine-grained spatial locality. Third, unlike prior approaches that rely primarily on post hoc similarity refinement, we perform early refinement of visual representations prior to image-text interaction, followed by late refinement of the resulting image-text correlation features, enabling more accurate and robust dense predictions in cluttered scenes. Finally, we propose a high-resolution local-global inference strategy based on sliding-window aggregation, which preserves spatial detail while maintaining global context. We conduct extensive experiments on five widely adopted OVSS benchmarks to evaluate our approach. The results demonstrate its effectiveness and robustness, consistently outperforming current state-of-the-art methods.