Medical Referring Image Segmentation via Next-Token Mask Prediction
Medical Referring Image Segmentation (MRIS) involves segmenting target regions in medical images based on natural language descriptions. While achieving promising results, recent approaches usually involve complex design of multimodal fusion or multi-stage decoders. In this work, we propose NTP-MRISeg, a novel framework that reformulates MRIS as an autoregressive next-token prediction task over a unified multimodal sequence of tokenized image, text, and mask representations. This formulation streamlines model design by eliminating the need for modality-specific fusion and external segmentation models, supports a unified architecture for end-to-end training. It also enables the use of pretrained tokenizers from emerging large-scale multimodal models, enhancing generalization and adaptability. More importantly, to address challenges under this formulation-such as exposure bias, long-tail token distributions, and fine-grained lesion edges-we propose three novel strategies: (1) a Next-k Token Prediction (NkTP) scheme to reduce cumulative prediction errors, (2) Token-level Contrastive Learning (TCL) to enhance boundary sensitivity and mitigate long-tail distribution effects, and (3) a memory-based Hard Error Token (HET) optimization strategy that emphasizes difficult tokens during training. Extensive experiments on the QaTa-COV19 and MosMedData+ datasets demonstrate that NTP-MRISeg achieves new state-of-the-art performance, offering a streamlined and effective alternative to traditional MRIS pipelines.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Tasks
Contrastive LearningImage SegmentationSimilar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
UNeXt: MLP-based Rapid Medical Image Segmentation Network
UNet and its latest extensions like TransUNet have been the leading medical image segmentation methods in recent years. However, these networks cannot be effectively adopted for rapid image segmentation in point-of-care …
DecoderImage SegmentationMedical Image SegmentationSegmentation+1CausalCLIPSeg: Unlocking CLIP's Potential in Referring Medical Image Segmentation with Causal Intervention
Referring medical image segmentation targets delineating lesions indicated by textual descriptions. Aligning visual and textual cues is challenging due to their distinct data properties. Inspired by large-scale pre-train…
Image SegmentationMedical Image SegmentationSegmentationSemantic SegmentationSemi-MedRef: Semi-Supervised Medical Referring Image Segmentation with Cross-Modal Alignment
Medical referring image segmentation (MRIS) predicts lesion masks from medical images and natural-language referring expressions, but acquiring paired pixel-level annotations and referring texts is costly. Semi-supervise…
Contrastive LearningImage SegmentationIBISAgent: Reinforcing Pixel-Level Visual Reasoning in MLLMs for Universal Biomedical Object Referring and Segmentation
Recent research on medical MLLMs has gradually shifted its focus from image-level understanding to fine-grained, pixel-level comprehension. Although segmentation serves as the foundation for pixel-level understanding, ex…
Reinforcement LearningVisual ReasoningVIPA: Visual Informative Part Attention for Referring Image Segmentation
Referring Image Segmentation (RIS) aims to segment a target object described by a natural language expression. Existing methods have evolved by leveraging the vision information into the language tokens. To more effectiv…
Image Segmentation