Abstract:Recent progress has been made in region-aware vision-language modeling, particularly with the emergence of the Describe Anything Model (DAM). DAM is capable of generating detailed descriptions of any specific image areas or objects without the need for additional localized image-text alignment supervision. We hypothesize that such region-level descriptive capability is beneficial for the task of Visual Question Answering (VQA), especially in challenging scenarios involving images with dense text. In such settings, the fine-grained extraction of textual information is crucial to producing correct answers. Motivated by this, we introduce DAM-QA, a framework with a tailored evaluation protocol, developed to investigate and harness the region-aware capabilities from DAM for the text-rich VQA problem that requires reasoning over text-based information within images. DAM-QA incorporates a mechanism that aggregates answers from multiple regional views of image content, enabling more effective identification of evidence that may be tied to text-related elements. Experiments on six VQA benchmarks show that our approach consistently outperforms the baseline DAM, with a notable 7+ point gain on DocVQA. DAM-QA also achieves the best overall performance among region-aware models with fewer parameters, significantly narrowing the gap with strong generalist VLMs. These results highlight the potential of DAM-like models for text-rich and broader VQA tasks when paired with efficient usage and integration strategies. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/Linvyl/DAM-QA.git.
Abstract:Medical image segmentation is vital for clinical diagnosis, yet current deep learning methods often demand extensive expert effort, i.e., either through annotating large training datasets or providing prompts at inference time for each new case. This paper introduces a zero-shot and automatic segmentation pipeline that combines off-the-shelf vision-language and segmentation foundation models. Given a medical image and a task definition (e.g., "segment the optic disc in an eye fundus image"), our method uses a grounding model to generate an initial bounding box, followed by a visual prompt boosting module that enhance the prompts, which are then processed by a promptable segmentation model to produce the final mask. To address the challenges of domain gap and result verification, we introduce a test-time adaptation framework featuring a set of learnable adaptors that align the medical inputs with foundation model representations. Its hyperparameters are optimized via Bayesian Optimization, guided by a proxy validation model without requiring ground-truth labels. Our pipeline offers an annotation-efficient and scalable solution for zero-shot medical image segmentation across diverse tasks. Our pipeline is evaluated on seven diverse medical imaging datasets and shows promising results. By proper decomposition and test-time adaptation, our fully automatic pipeline performs competitively with weakly-prompted interactive foundation models.