DOEI: Dual Optimization of Embedding Information for Attention-Enhanced
  Class Activation Maps
Authors: name: Hongjie Zhu; name: Zeyu Zhang; name: Guansong Pang; name: Xu Wang; name: Shimin Wen; name: Yu Bai; name: Daji Ergu; name: Ying Cai; name: Yang Zhao
Published: 2025-02-21 19:06:01

Abstract: Weakly supervised semantic segmentation (WSSS) typically utilizes limited
semantic annotations to obtain initial Class Activation Maps (CAMs). However,
due to the inadequate coupling between class activation responses and semantic
information in high-dimensional space, the CAM is prone to object co-occurrence
or under-activation, resulting in inferior recognition accuracy. To tackle this
issue, we propose DOEI, Dual Optimization of Embedding Information, a novel
approach that reconstructs embedding representations through semantic-aware
attention weight matrices to optimize the expression capability of embedding
information. Specifically, DOEI amplifies tokens with high confidence and
suppresses those with low confidence during the class-to-patch interaction.
This alignment of activation responses with semantic information strengthens
the propagation and decoupling of target features, enabling the generated
embeddings to more accurately represent target features in high-level semantic
space. In addition, we propose a hybrid-feature alignment module in DOEI that
combines RGB values, embedding-guided features, and self-attention weights to
increase the reliability of candidate tokens. Comprehensive experiments show
that DOEI is an effective plug-and-play module that empowers state-of-the-art
visual transformer-based WSSS models to significantly improve the quality of
CAMs and segmentation performance on popular benchmarks, including PASCAL VOC
(+3.6%, +1.5%, +1.2% mIoU) and MS COCO (+1.2%, +1.6% mIoU). Code will be
available at https://github.com/AIGeeksGroup/DOEI.