Training-Free Fine-Grained Semantic Segmentations in Low Data Regimes: A FungiTastic Baseline
Authors: Sebastian Cavada, Francesco Pelosin, Lapo Faggi
Organizations: Covision Lab, Bressanone, South Tyrol, Italy
Abstract
Fine-grained semantic segmentation requires both precise localization and discrimination between visually similar classes. In FungiTastic, this problem is further complicated by a long-tailed distribution and strong variation in image acquisition conditions. We propose a training-free two-stage framework that decouples segmentation from classification. SAM3 first produces class-agnostic mushroom masks using macro-taxonomic prompts, and DINOv3 then assigns fine-grained labels through prototype matching in the embedding space. To improve this stage, we apply a simple transformation of the DINOv3 feature space that improves prototype-based classification. Compared with class-specific prompting, our approach is more scalable and keeps the segmentation cost low. We report results from one-shot to few-hundred-shot regimes, providing, to the best of our knowledge, the first baseline for fine-grained semantic segmentation in low-data settings.
Open-vocabulary segmentation models such as SAM3 perform well across broad categories via text prompting, yet degrade when target classes are visually underrepresented in pretraining or depart from canonical depictions-limitations text prompts cannot resolve spatially. We present SegRAG, a training-free retrieval-augmented segmentation framework that grounds SAM3 with class-specific point prompts derived from a curated DINOv3 feature bank. Offline, dense patch-level descriptors are extracted from annotated references and filtered by Intra-Class Cohesion Distillation (ICCD), retaining only prototypes that reliably retrieve within-class foreground. At inference, Topographic Similarity Grounding (TSG) computes a cosine-similarity landscape against retrieved prototypes, identifies coherent high-confidence regions via connected-component analysis, and extracts peak locations through non-maximum suppression. The resulting point prompts are delivered jointly with class-name text in a single SAM3 forward pass. On four standard benchmarks, SegRAG consistently outperforms the text-only baseline, gaining up to +3.92 mIoU on LVIS. On AgML agricultural benchmarks under zero-shot domain transfer, it raises mean IoU from 25.27 to 59.24 (+33.97) and recovers individual classes from zero to over 95 mIoU. Ablations confirm that ICCD, TSG, and joint prompting each contribute independently and compound when combined. Code is available at (https://github.com/boudiafA/SegRAG).
Remote sensing semantic segmentation is hindered by costly pixel-level annotations, motivating training-free open-vocabulary methods. Recently, the recent release of DINOv3 brings DINO.txt, which equips the standalone DINO backbone with image-text contrastive learning and thus opens up the possibility of open-vocabulary segmentation. We propose DinoSplat-OV, a training-free framework that adapts DINOv3 to remote sensing without fine-tuning or additional pretraining. Targeting the dense distribution, multi-scale nature, and large size of remote sensing imagery, we design two core modules. Its Text-aware Laplacian Propagation module de-noises patch-level predictions by combining textual semantic affinities with local visual similarity, improving regional consistency while preserving boundaries. Its Gaussian Splatting Upsampling module reconstructs pixel-level features through RGB-guided anisotropic aggregation and test-time optimization. A global-anchor sliding-window strategy further supports large-scale imagery. Experiments on UDD5, DOTA, and LoveDA demonstrate competitive or superior performance over existing training-free methods, effectively filling the gap of DINO-series models in training-free open-vocabulary segmentation and providing a viable new path for further advances in this direction.
Cross-domain Few-shot Segmentation (CD-FSS) aims to transfer knowledge learned from source domain to distinct target domains, segmenting unseen target classes with only a few annotated samples. Although existing methods have made significant progress, they still rely on training or fine-tuning processes, which incur high computational costs and risk overfitting. We observe that when powerful and general-purpose vision foundation models are incorporated into these methods, their performance shows only marginal improvement or even degrades due to overfitting. To address this, we eliminate trainable parameters and propose a training-free framework to avoid both training overhead and overfitting. Built upon the self-supervised vision encoder DINOv3, our framework addresses cross-domain challenges through three core modules. First, the Semantic-aware Feature Re-fusion (SAFR) module identifies and re-fuses features that emphasize semantic patterns, generating representations with enhanced semantic discriminability. Additionally, the Adaptive Support Enhancement (ASE) module narrows semantic gaps between support and query through robust query information aggregation. Finally, the Hybrid Prototype Matching (HPM) module integrates matching results from diverse prototypes to adapt to varying semantic complexity across domains. Extensive experiments on four target domain datasets demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in CD-FSS without any training.