MSEA: empowering CLIP with multi-scale efficient linear attention for weakly supervised semantic segmentation

Weakly supervised semantic segmentation (WSSS) aims to produce pixel-level predictions from image-level labels, but it often suffers from incomplete object activation and background ambiguity due to the inherent bias of class activation maps (CAMs). Existing CLIP-based methods improve semantic alignment, they struggle to jointly capture fine grained local details and long-range global dependencies, leading to fragmented activations and blurred boundaries. To address this, we propose a CLIP-based WSSS framework with multi-scale semantic enhancement attention (MSEA) module. MSEA combines multi-scale depthwise separable convolution (DSConv) for local feature extraction, linear attention for efficient global interaction, and an efficient attention (EA) refinement mechanism to suppress noise and enhance boundary quality. And adopt structured attribute embeddings for better semantic guidance. Experiments show that our method outperforms existing single-stage approaches, achieving 75.4%, 76.6%, and 48.1% mIoU on PASCAL VOC 2012 and MS COCO 2014, with clear improvements in CAM completeness and segmentation quality.

Authors

Institutions

Publication Details

Journal
Complex & Intelligent Systems
Published
2026-09-01
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/s40747-026-02474-2
Primary Topic
Advanced Neural Network Applications
Type
article
Field-Weighted Citation Impact
0.00
Controls
|||
ALL TIME
JAN
FEB
MAR
APR
MAY
JUN
JUL
AUG
SEP
OCT
article

MSEA: empowering CLIP with multi-scale efficient linear attention for weakly supervised semantic segmentation

Zhenhao Zhao, Lingling Li, Xiaoming Bai, Xiaoyan Shao et al.
Complex & Intelligent Systems
Advanced Neural Network Applications
article

MSEA: empowering CLIP with multi-scale efficient linear attention for weakly supervised semantic segmentation

Zhenhao Zhao, Lingling Li, Xiaoming Bai, Xiaoyan Shao, MengMeng Tang, XueZhuan Zhao
article en

Abstract

Weakly supervised semantic segmentation (WSSS) aims to produce pixel-level predictions from image-level labels, but it often suffers from incomplete object activation and background ambiguity due to the inherent bias of class activation maps (CAMs). Existing CLIP-based methods improve semantic alignment, they struggle to jointly capture fine grained local details and long-range global dependencies, leading to fragmented activations and blurred boundaries. To address this, we propose a CLIP-based WSSS framework with multi-scale semantic enhancement attention (MSEA) module. MSEA combines multi-scale depthwise separable convolution (DSConv) for local feature extraction, linear attention for efficient global interaction, and an efficient attention (EA) refinement mechanism to suppress noise and enhance boundary quality. And adopt structured attribute embeddings for better semantic guidance. Experiments show that our method outperforms existing single-stage approaches, achieving 75.4%, 76.6%, and 48.1% mIoU on PASCAL VOC 2012 and MS COCO 2014, with clear improvements in CAM completeness and segmentation quality.

Complex & Intelligent Systems
Zhengzhou University of Aeronautics (CN), Henan University of Technology (CN)
Openalex Percentile: Top 13%
Advanced Neural Network Applications
AI Navigator

Ask Laika to Summarize, Analyze, and Connect papers live on the map.

Summarize Papers & Methodologies

Extract key findings, datasets, and comparative methods across publications.

Benchmark Rankings & Visual Analytics

Rank top research institutions, authors, funders, topics, and journals by Field-Weighted Citation Impact (FWCI) and paper volume with instant charts.

Connect Distant Disciplines

Bridge topological clusters on the map to find hidden collaborative intersections.