CLIPSym: Delving into Symmetry Detection with CLIP
Authors: name: Tinghan Yang; name: Md Ashiqur Rahman; name: Raymond A. Yeh
Published: 2025-08-19 18:43:14

Abstract: Symmetry is one of the most fundamental geometric cues in computer vision,
and detecting it has been an ongoing challenge. With the recent advances in
vision-language models,~i.e., CLIP, we investigate whether a pre-trained CLIP
model can aid symmetry detection by leveraging the additional symmetry cues
found in the natural image descriptions. We propose CLIPSym, which leverages
CLIP's image and language encoders and a rotation-equivariant decoder based on
a hybrid of Transformer and G-Convolution to detect rotation and reflection
symmetries. To fully utilize CLIP's language encoder, we have developed a novel
prompting technique called Semantic-Aware Prompt Grouping (SAPG), which
aggregates a diverse set of frequent object-based prompts to better integrate
the semantic cues for symmetry detection. Empirically, we show that CLIPSym
outperforms the current state-of-the-art on three standard symmetry detection
datasets (DENDI, SDRW, and LDRS). Finally, we conduct detailed ablations
verifying the benefits of CLIP's pre-training, the proposed equivariant
decoder, and the SAPG technique. The code is available at
https://github.com/timyoung2333/CLIPSym.