Label-Efficient Few-Shot Semantic Segmentation with Unsupervised Meta-Training

The goal of this paper is to alleviate the training cost for few-shot semantic segmentation (FSS) models. Despite that FSS in nature improves model generalization to new concepts using only a handful of test exemplars, it relies on strong supervision from a considerable amount of labeled training data for base classes. However, collecting pixel-level annotations is notoriously expensive and time-consuming, and small-scale training datasets convey low information density that limits test-time generalization. To resolve the issue, we take a pioneering step towards label-efficient training of FSS models from fully unlabeled training data, or additionally a few labeled samples to enhance the performance. This motivates an approach based on a novel unsupervised meta-training paradigm. In particular, the approach first distills pre-trained unsupervised pixel embedding into compact semantic clusters from which a massive number of pseudo meta-tasks is constructed. To mitigate the noise in the pseudo meta-tasks, we further advocate a robust Transformer-based FSS model with a novel prototype-based cross-attention design. Extensive experiments have been conducted on two standard benchmarks, i.e., PASCAL-5ⁱ and COCO-20ⁱ, and the results show that our method produces impressive performance without any annotations, and is comparable to fully supervised competitors even using only 20% of the annotations. Our code is available at: https://github.com/SSSKYue/UMTFSS.