Curriculum Point Prompting for Weakly-Supervised Referring Image
  Segmentation
Qiyuan Dai Sibei Yang
Referring image segmentation (RIS) aims to precisely segment referents in
images through corresponding natural language expressions, yet relying on
cost-intensive mask annotations. Weakly supervised RIS thus learns from
image-text pairs to pixel-level semantics, which is challenging for segmenting
fine-grained masks. A natural approach to enhancing segmentation precision is
to empower weakly supervised RIS with the image segmentation foundation model
SAM. Nevertheless, we observe that simply integrating SAM yields limited
benefits and can even lead to performance regression due to the inevitable
noise issues and challenges in excessive focus on object parts. In this paper,
we present an innovative framework, Point PrompTing (PPT), incorporated with
the proposed multi-source curriculum learning strategy to address these
challenges. Specifically, the core of PPT is a point generator that not only
harnesses CLIP's text-image alignment capability and SAM's powerful mask
generation ability but also generates negative point prompts to address the
noisy and excessive focus issues inherently and effectively. In addition, we
introduce a curriculum learning strategy with object-centric images to help PPT
gradually learn from simpler yet precise semantic alignment to more complex
RIS. Experiments demonstrate that our PPT significantly and consistently
outperforms prior weakly supervised techniques on mIoU by 11.34%, 14.14%, and
6.97% across RefCOCO, RefCOCO+, and G-Ref, respectively.