Dual-Adaptive SAM3: Hierarchical Routing over Low-Rank Expert Layers for Parameter-Efficient Medical Image Segmentation
This work addresses the challenge of adapting large vision-language models to medical imaging with high accuracy and extreme parameter efficiency, enabling practical clinical deployment.
Dual-Adaptive SAM3 introduces a parameter-efficient adaptation of SAM3 for medical image segmentation, achieving over 80% reduction in MoE parameters while matching or exceeding fully fine-tuned models and achieving a 5% gain over state-of-the-art methods.
The Segment Anything Model with Concepts (SAM3) heralds a new paradigm for open-vocabulary segmentation through natural language interaction, offering significant potential for medical image analysis. However, effectively adapting such a powerful vision-language model to the diverse and nuanced domain of medical imaging remains a key challenge. Naive fine-tuning is parameter-inefficient, while standard Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) methods introduce prohibitive computational overhead, limiting their clinical applicability. To address this, we propose Dual-Adaptive SAM3 (DA-SAM3), a novel framework that achieves both high segmentation accuracy and extreme parameter efficiency via a dual-adaptive specialization mechanism. Our first adaptation is task-aware: a Dynamic Expert Router (DER) that sparsely activates the most relevant experts by jointly reasoning about the visual input and the textual concept prompt, mimicking a clinical consultation process. Our second adaptation is parameter-aware: a Decomposed Parameterized Experts (DPE) design that represents each expert as a shared frozen base (inherited from the pretrained SAM3) and a lightweight trainable low-rank delta, reducing MoE parameter overhead by over 80\%. Extensive experiments on multiple public medical segmentation benchmarks demonstrate that Dual-Adaptive SAM3 not only matches or exceeds the accuracy of fully fine-tuned SAM3 and standard MoE baselines, but also achieves a notable 5\% gain over current state-of-the-art methods, with interpretable results validating its effectiveness. The code is available at: https://github.com/Reconsider80/DA-SAM3.