UniGS: Unified Representation for Image Generation and Segmentation
Authors: Lu Qi, Lehan Yang, Weidong Guo, Yu Xu, Bo Du, Varun Jampani, Ming-Hsuan Yang

This paper introduces a novel unified representation of diffusion models for image generation and segmentation. Specifically we use a colormap to represent entity-level masks addressing the challenge of varying entity numbers while aligning the representation closely with the image RGB domain. Two novel modules including the location-aware color palette and progressive dichotomy module are proposed to support our mask representation. On the one hand a location-aware palette guarantees the colors' consistency to entities' locations. On the other hand the progressive dichotomy module can efficiently decode the synthesized colormap to high-quality entity-level masks in a depth-first binary search without knowing the cluster numbers. To tackle the issue of lacking large-scale segmentation training data we employ an inpainting pipeline and then improve the flexibility of diffusion models across various tasks including inpainting image synthesis referring segmentation and entity segmentation. Comprehensive experiments validate the efficiency of our approach demonstrating comparable segmentation mask quality to state-of-the-art and adaptability to multiple tasks.