Visual In-Context Prompting

Feng Li, Qing Jiang, Hao Zhang, Tianhe Ren, Shilong Liu, Xueyan Zou, Huaizhe Xu, Hongyang Li, Jianwei Yang, Chunyuan Li, Lei Zhang, Jianfeng Gao; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2024, pp. 12861-12871

In-context prompting in large language models (LLMs) has become a prevalent approach to improve zero-shot capabilities but this idea is less explored in the vision domain. Existing visual prompting methods focus on referring segmentation to segment the most relevant object falling short of addressing many generic vision tasks like open-set segmentation and detection. In this paper we introduce a universal visual in-context prompting framework for both tasks as shown in Fig.1. In particular we build on top of an encoder-decoder architecture and develop a versatile prompt encoder to support a variety of prompts like strokes boxes and points. We further enhance it to take an arbitrary number of reference image segments as the context. Our extensive explorations show that the proposed visual in-context prompting elicits extraordinary referring and generic segmentation capabilities to refer and detect yielding competitive performance to close-set in-domain datasets and showing promising results on many open-set segmentation datasets. By joint training on COCO and SA-1B DINOv achieves 57.7 PQ on COCO and 23.2 PQ on ADE20K. Code will be available at https://github.com/UX-Decoder/DINOv