ReAttnCLIP: Training-Free Open-Vocabulary Remote Sensing Image Segmentation via Re-defined Attention in CLIP

Xin Niu, Manqi Zhao, Dongsheng Jiang, Yingying Wu, Bing Su; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2026, pp. 24980-24989

Remote sensing image segmentation is critical for a range of applications, including natural disaster monitoring and precision agriculture. Open-vocabulary segmentation enhances flexibility by removing fixed category constraints, enabling more fine-grained and adaptive scene understanding. Unlike CLIP's original pretraining objective, which emphasizes global image-text alignment, segmentation tasks require accurate and discriminative patch-level representations to support precise pixel-wise predictions. As a result, the quality of attention maps--particularly those generated in the final transformer layers--plays a pivotal role in guiding inter-region interactions. However, current methods generate suboptimal representations when capturing the complex spatial hierarchies in remote sensing. We address this gap by optimizing CLIP's 197x197 attention matrix through three key modifications: (1) substituting the 196x196 patch-to-patch submatrix with intermediate-layer feature similarities to preserve spatial structures; (2) prioritizing intermediate-layer attention for global-to-local (class-to-patch) token alignment to reduce classification interference; (3) disabling the \texttt [CLS] token's self-attention to mitigate bias. Extensive experiments on eight remote sensing benchmarks and two building/road extraction datasets demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance among existing training-free approaches.