We propose the new task'open-world video instance segmentation and captioning'.

Work done at Microsoft internship and UNC.

F oundation models have revolutionized AI, yet they struggle with zero-shot deployment in real-world industrial settings due to a lack of high-quality, domain-specific datasets. T o bridge this gap, Superb AI introduces ZERO, an industry-ready vision foundation model that leverages multi-modal prompting (textual and visual) for generalization without retraining. Trained on a compact yet representative 0.9 million annotated samples from a proprietary billion-scale industrial dataset, ZERO demonstrates competitive performance on academic benchmarks like LVIS-V al and significantly outperforms existing models across 37 diverse industrial datasets. Furthermore, ZERO achieved 2nd place in the CVPR 2025 Object Instance Detection Challenge and 4th place in the F oundational Few-shot Object Detection Challenge, highlighting its practical deployability and gen-eralizability with minimal adaptation and limited data. T o the best of our knowledge, ZERO is the first vision foundation model explicitly built for domain-specific, zero-shot industrial applications.

The Segment Anything Model (SAM) has demonstrated impressive generalization in prompt-based segmentation. Yet, the potential of semantic text prompts remains underexplored compared to traditional spatial prompts like points and boxes. This paper introduces SAM-PTx, a parameter-efficient approach for adapting SAM using frozen CLIP-derived text embeddings as class-level semantic guidance. Specifically, we propose a lightweight adapter design called Parallel-Text that injects text embeddings into SAM's image encoder, enabling semantics-guided segmentation while keeping most of the original architecture frozen. Our adapter modifies only the MLP-parallel branch of each transformer block, preserving the attention pathway for spatial reasoning. Through supervised experiments and ablations on the COD10K dataset as well as low-data subsets of COCO and ADE20K, we show that incorporating fixed text embeddings as input improves segmentation performance over purely spatial prompt baselines. To our knowledge, this is the first work to use text prompts for segmentation on the COD10K dataset. These results suggest that integrating semantic conditioning into SAM's architecture offers a practical and scalable path for efficient adaptation with minimal computational complexity.

Pancreatic cancer carries a poor prognosis and relies on endoscopic ultrasound (EUS) for targeted biopsy and radiotherapy. However, the speckle noise, low contrast, and unintuitive appearance of EUS make segmentation of pancreatic tumors with fully supervised deep learning (DL) models both error-prone and dependent on large, expert-curated annotation datasets. To address these challenges, we present TextSAM-EUS, a novel, lightweight, text-driven adaptation of the Segment Anything Model (SAM) that requires no manual geometric prompts at inference. Our approach leverages text prompt learning (context optimization) through the BiomedCLIP text encoder in conjunction with a LoRA-based adaptation of SAM's architecture to enable automatic pancreatic tumor segmentation in EUS, tuning only 0.86% of the total parameters. On the public Endoscopic Ultrasound Database of the Pancreas, TextSAM-EUS with automatic prompts attains 82.69% Dice and 85.28% normalized surface distance (NSD), and with manual geometric prompts reaches 83.10% Dice and 85.70% NSD, outperforming both existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) supervised DL models and foundation models (e.g., SAM and its variants). As the first attempt to incorporate prompt learning in SAM-based medical image segmentation, TextSAM-EUS offers a practical option for efficient and robust automatic EUS segmentation. Code is available at https://github.com/HealthX-Lab/TextSAM-EUS .

Pre-trained large language models (LLMs) have become a cornerstone of modern natural language processing, with their capabilities extending across a wide range of applications and languages. However, the fine-tuning of multilingual LLMs, especially for low-resource languages, faces significant challenges arising from data-sharing restrictions (the physical border) and inherent linguistic differences (the linguistic border). These barriers hinder users of various languages, particularly those in low-resource regions, from fully benefiting from the advantages of LLMs. To address these challenges, we propose the Federated Prompt Tuning Paradigm for multilingual scenarios, which utilizes parameter-efficient fine-tuning while adhering to data sharing restrictions. We design a comprehensive set of experiments and analyze them using a novel notion of language distance to highlight the strengths of our paradigm: Even under computational constraints, our method not only improves data efficiency but also facilitates mutual enhancements across languages, particularly benefiting low-resource ones. Compared to traditional local cross-lingual transfer tuning methods, our approach achieves 6.9\% higher accuracy with improved data efficiency, and demonstrates greater stability and generalization. These findings underscore the potential of our approach to promote social equality and champion linguistic diversity, ensuring that no language is left behind.

Accurate segmentation is essential for effective treatment planning and disease monitoring. Existing medical image segmentation methods predominantly rely on uni-modal visual inputs, such as images or videos, requiring labor-intensive manual annotations. Additionally, medical imaging techniques capture multiple intertwined organs within a single scan, further complicating segmentation accuracy. To address these challenges, MedSAM, a large-scale medical segmentation model based on the Segment Anything Model (SAM), was developed to enhance segmentation accuracy by integrating image features with user-provided prompts. While MedSAM has demonstrated strong performance across various medical segmentation tasks, it primarily relies on geometric prompts (e.g., points and bounding boxes) and lacks support for text-based prompts, which could help specify subtle or ambiguous anatomical structures. To overcome these limitations, we propose the Organ-aware Multi-scale Text-guided Medical Image Segmentation Model (OMT-SAM) for multi-organ segmentation. Our approach introduces CLIP encoders as a novel image-text prompt encoder, operating with the geometric prompt encoder to provide informative contextual guidance. We pair descriptive textual prompts with corresponding images, processing them through pre-trained CLIP encoders and a cross-attention mechanism to generate fused image-text embeddings. Additionally, we extract multi-scale visual features from MedSAM, capturing fine-grained anatomical details at different levels of granularity. We evaluate OMT-SAM on the FLARE 2021 dataset, benchmarking its performance against existing segmentation methods. Empirical results demonstrate that OMT-SAM achieves a mean Dice Similarity Coefficient of 0.937, outperforming MedSAM (0.893) and other segmentation models, highlighting its superior capability in handling complex medical image segmentation tasks.

Foundational models such as the Segment Anything Model (SAM) are gaining traction in medical imaging segmentation, supporting multiple downstream tasks. However, such models are supervised in nature, still relying on large annotated datasets or prompts supplied by experts. Conventional techniques such as active learning to alleviate such limitations are limited in scope and still necessitate continuous human involvement and complex domain knowledge for label refinement or establishing reward ground truth. To address these challenges, we propose an enhanced Segment Anything Model (SAM) framework that utilizes annotation-efficient prompts generated in a fully unsupervised fashion, while still capturing essential semantic, location, and shape information through contrastive language-image pretraining and visual question answering. We adopt the direct preference optimization technique to design an optimal policy that enables the model to generate high-fidelity segmentations with simple ratings or rankings provided by a virtual annotator simulating the human annotation process. State-of-the-art performance of our framework in tasks such as lung segmentation, breast tumor segmentation, and organ segmentation across various modalities, including X-ray, ultrasound, and abdominal CT, justifies its effectiveness in low-annotation data scenarios.