From Static to Interactive: Adapting Visual in-Context Learners for User-Driven Tasks
This work addresses the need for interactive control in visual in-context learning, enabling users to guide predictions with cues like scribbles or clicks, which is incremental as it builds on existing models like DeLVM.
The paper tackled the problem of static visual in-context learning models lacking user interaction mechanisms, proposing a method to adapt them for user-driven tasks, resulting in improvements such as +7.95% IoU for interactive segmentation and +2.46 PSNR for directed super-resolution.
Visual in-context learning models are designed to adapt to new tasks by leveraging a set of example input-output pairs, enabling rapid generalization without task-specific fine-tuning. However, these models operate in a fundamentally static paradigm: while they can adapt to new tasks, they lack any mechanism to incorporate user-provided guidance signals such as scribbles, clicks, or bounding boxes to steer or refine the prediction process. This limitation is particularly restrictive in real-world applications, where users want to actively guide model predictions, e.g., by highlighting the target object for segmentation, indicating a region which should be visually altered, or isolating a specific person in a complex scene to run targeted pose estimation. In this work, we propose a simple method to transform static visual in-context learners, particularly the DeLVM approach, into highly controllable, user-driven systems, i.e., Interactive DeLVM, enabling seamless interaction through natural visual cues such as scribbles, clicks, or drawing boxes. Specifically, by encoding interactions directly into the example input-output pairs, we keep the philosophy of visual in-context learning intact: enabling users to prompt models with unseen interactions without fine-tuning and empowering them to dynamically steer model predictions with personalized interactions. Our experiments demonstrate that SOTA visual in-context learning models fail to effectively leverage interaction cues, often ignoring user guidance entirely. In contrast, our method excels in controllable, user-guided scenarios, achieving improvements of $+7.95%$ IoU for interactive segmentation, $+2.46$ PSNR for directed super-resolution, and $-3.14%$ LPIPS for interactive object removal. With this, our work bridges the gap between rigid static task adaptation and fluid interactivity for user-centric visual in-context learning.