Georges El Fakhri

Xiaoqi Zhao, Youwei Pang, Shijie Chang et al.

As large-scale foundation models trained on billions of image--mask pairs covering a vast diversity of scenes, objects, and contexts, SAM and its upgraded version, SAM~2, have significantly influenced multiple fields within computer vision. Leveraging such unprecedented data diversity, they exhibit strong open-world segmentation capabilities, with SAM~2 further enhancing these capabilities to support high-quality video segmentation. While SAMs (SAM and SAM~2) have demonstrated excellent performance in segmenting context-independent concepts like people, cars, and roads, they overlook more challenging context-dependent (CD) concepts, such as visual saliency, camouflage, industrial defects, and medical lesions. CD concepts rely heavily on global and local contextual information, making them susceptible to shifts in different contexts, which requires strong discriminative capabilities from the model. The lack of comprehensive evaluation of SAMs limits understanding of their performance boundaries, which may hinder the design of future models. In this paper, we conduct a thorough evaluation of SAMs on 11 CD concepts across 2D and 3D images and videos in various visual modalities within natural, medical, and industrial scenes. We develop a unified evaluation framework for SAM and SAM~2 that supports manual, automatic, and intermediate self-prompting, aided by our specific prompt generation and interaction strategies. We further explore the potential of SAM~2 for in-context learning and introduce prompt robustness testing to simulate real-world imperfect prompts. Finally, we analyze the benefits and limitations of SAMs in understanding CD concepts and discuss their future development in segmentation tasks.

Xiaofeng Liu, Yongsong Huang, Thibault Marin et al.

The to-be-denoised positron emission tomography (PET) volumes are inherent with diverse count levels, which imposes challenges for a unified model to tackle varied cases. In this work, we resort to the recently flourished prompt learning to achieve generalizable PET denoising with different count levels. Specifically, we propose dual prompts to guide the PET denoising in a divide-and-conquer manner, i.e., an explicitly count-level prompt to provide the specific prior information and an implicitly general denoising prompt to encode the essential PET denoising knowledge. Then, a novel prompt fusion module is developed to unify the heterogeneous prompts, followed by a prompt-feature interaction module to inject prompts into the features. The prompts are able to dynamically guide the noise-conditioned denoising process. Therefore, we are able to efficiently train a unified denoising model for various count levels, and deploy it to different cases with personalized prompts. We evaluated on 1940 low-count PET 3D volumes with uniformly randomly selected 13-22\% fractions of events from 97 $^{18}$F-MK6240 tau PET studies. It shows our dual prompting can largely improve the performance with informed count-level and outperform the count-conditional model.