  Significant strides have been made using large vision-language models, like
Stable Diffusion (SD), for a variety of downstream tasks, including image
editing, image correspondence, and 3D shape generation. Inspired by these
advancements, we explore leveraging these extensive vision-language models for
segmenting images at any desired granularity using as few as one annotated
sample by proposing SLiMe. SLiMe frames this problem as an optimization task.
Specifically, given a single training image and its segmentation mask, we first
extract attention maps, including our novel "weighted accumulated
self-attention map" from the SD prior. Then, using the extracted attention
maps, the text embeddings of Stable Diffusion are optimized such that, each of
them, learn about a single segmented region from the training image. These
learned embeddings then highlight the segmented region in the attention maps,
which in turn can then be used to derive the segmentation map. This enables
SLiMe to segment any real-world image during inference with the granularity of
the segmented region in the training image, using just one example. Moreover,
leveraging additional training data when available, i.e. few-shot, improves the
performance of SLiMe. We carried out a knowledge-rich set of experiments
examining various design factors and showed that SLiMe outperforms other
existing one-shot and few-shot segmentation methods.
