ZeroDSS: Semantic Segmentation from Class Names Alone

Overview & Synopsis

Semantic segmentation depends heavily on real images with pixel-level annotations, making dense supervision a major obstacle to deployment in new domains. We study task-specific data-free semantic segmentation, where training uses generic pretrained generative priors but has access to no target-domain images, masks, or captions--only a predefined category set. We introduce Zero-Data Semantic Segmentation (ZeroDSS), a feedback-driven approach that treats synthetic supervision as an adaptively controllable training distribution rather than a direct surrogate for real data. ZeroDSS constructs a semantically structured prompt distribution through LLM-guided compositional generation and adaptive class rebalancing, then converts the prompts into image-mask pairs using diffusion attention. Its feedback-driven distribution refinement consists of a two-phase closed-loop training procedure with a single loop-back step. In Phase I, a segmenter is trained using confidence-weighted supervision and dual-scale consistency. In Phase II, model feedback is used to adaptively target underperforming categories and refine diffusion-derived masks using model predictions. After this refined initial training, a teacher-student framework is utilized in the final phase to iteratively improve the fused supervision and segmenter through exponential moving average (EMA) updates. Using synthetic training data only, ZeroDSS achieves 35.0% mIoU on MS COCO with DeepLabV3, and 66.3% and 63.5% mIoU on PASCAL VOC with DeepLabV3 and Mask2Former, respectively. These results show that explicitly constructing and iteratively refining the synthetic supervision distribution can substantially reduce the synthetic-to-real gap in dense prediction.