DSV-LFS: Unifying LLM-Driven Semantic Cues with Visual Features for Robust Few-Shot Segmentation

Abstract

Few-shot semantic segmentation (FSS) aims to enable models to segment novel/unseen object classes using only a limited number of labeled examples. However, current FSS methods frequently struggle with generalization due to incomplete and biased feature representations, especially when support images do not capture the full appearance variability of the target class. To improve the FSS pipeline, we propose a novel framework that utilizes large language models (LLMs) to adapt general class semantic information to the query image. Furthermore, the framework employs dense pixel-wise matching to identify similarities between query and support images, resulting in enhanced FSS performance. Inspired by reasoning-based segmentation frameworks, our method, named DSV-LFS, introduces an additional token into the LLM vocabulary, allowing a multimodal LLM to generate a "semantic prompt" from class descriptions. In parallel, a dense matching module identifies visual similarities between the query and support images, generating a "visual prompt". These prompts are then jointly employed to guide the prompt-based decoder for accurate segmentation of the query image. Comprehensive experiments on the benchmark datasets Pascal-5i and COCO20i demonstrate that our framework achieves state-of-the-art performance-by a significant margin-demonstrating superior generalization to novel classes and robustness across diverse scenarios. The source code is available at https://github.com/aminpdik/DSV-LFS