A lion man is typing in the o ffi ce. A beautiful girl is hugging a husky. A lion teacher wearing a suit is in front of a blackboard. A robot is riding under the blue and cloudy sky. Several youths are talking in a bar. A young woman is taking photos.

Recent advances in zero-shot referring image segmentation (RIS), driven by models such as the Segment Anything Model (SAM) and CLIP, have made substantial progress in aligning visual and textual information. Despite these successes, the extraction of precise and high-quality mask region representations remains a critical challenge, limiting the full potential of RIS tasks. In this paper, we introduce a training-free, hybrid global-local feature extraction approach that integrates detailed mask-specific features with contextual information from the surrounding area, enhancing mask region representation. To further strengthen alignment between mask regions and referring expressions, we propose a spatial guidance augmentation strategy that improves spatial coherence, which is essential for accurately localizing described areas. By incorporating multiple spatial cues, this approach facilitates more robust and precise referring segmentation. Extensive experiments on standard RIS benchmarks demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms existing zero-shot RIS models, achieving substantial performance gains. We believe our approach advances RIS tasks and establishes a versatile framework for region-text alignment, offering broader implications for cross-modal understanding and interaction. Code is available at https://github.com/fhgyuanshen/HybridGL .

Cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB) is critical to the understanding of the early universe and precise estimation of cosmological constants. Due to the contamination of thermal dust noise in the galaxy, the CMB map that is an image on the two-dimensional sphere has missing observations, mainly concentrated on the equatorial region. The noise of the CMB map has a significant impact on the estimation precision for cosmological parameters. Inpainting the CMB map can effectively reduce the uncertainty of parametric estimation. In this paper, we propose a deep learning-based variational autoencoder --- CosmoVAE, to restoring the missing observations of the CMB map. The input and output of CosmoVAE are square images. To generate training, validation, and test data sets, we segment the full-sky CMB map into many small images by Cartesian projection. CosmoVAE assigns physical quantities to the parameters of the VAE network by using the angular power spectrum of the Gaussian random field as latent variables. CosmoVAE adopts a new loss function to improve the learning performance of the model, which consists of $\ell_1$ reconstruction loss, Kullback-Leibler divergence between the posterior distribution of encoder network and the prior distribution of latent variables, perceptual loss, and total-variation regularizer. The proposed model achieves state of the art performance for Planck \texttt{Commander} 2018 CMB map inpainting.