Graduate School of Information Sciences, Tohoku University
(Department of Electrical, Information and Physics Engineering, School of Engineering, Tohoku University)
Computer Structures Laboratory

MARS-CLIP: Multi-Resolution and Attention Refined Zero-Shot Image Segmentation

Nagito Saito   (Tohoku University),  Shintaro Ito   (Tohoku University),  Koichi Ito   (Tohoku University),  Takafumi Aoki   (Tohoku University)

IEEE International Conference on Image Processing, pp. 1--6, September 2026.

Graphical Abstract
Abstract

Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) has demonstrated impressive capabilities in zero-shot transfer but often struggles with dense prediction tasks due to low spatial resolution and the loss of structural information. To address these limitations, we propose MARS-CLIP (Multi-resolution and Attention Refined Segmentation for CLIP), a novel framework for zero-shot semantic segmentation. Our approach introduces two key strategies: (i) a multi-resolution feature extraction module that fuses local fine-grained features with global context to overcome input resolution constraints, and (ii) an attention refinement mechanism that injects spatial and color biases from intermediate layers into the final self-attention block to accurately restore object boundaries. A set of experiments on six public datasets demonstrates that MARS-CLIP significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods.