user: text: Write a concise one-sentence TLDR summary of the scientific paper content below.

Title: Meta-Learning to Guide Segmentation

Paper content:
There are myriad kinds of segmentation, and ultimately the `"right" segmentation of a given scene is in the eye of the annotator.
Standard approaches require large amounts of labeled data to learn just one particular kind of segmentation.
As a first step towards relieving this annotation burden, we propose the problem of guided segmentation: given varying amounts of pixel-wise labels, segment unannotated pixels by propagating supervision locally (within an image) and non-locally (across images).
We propose guided networks, which extract a latent task representation---guidance---from variable amounts and classes (categories, instances, etc.) of pixel supervision and optimize our architecture end-to-end for fast, accurate, and data-efficient segmentation by meta-learning.
To span the few-shot and many-shot learning regimes, we examine guidance from as little as one pixel per concept to as much as 1000+ images, and compare to full gradient optimization at both extremes.
To explore generalization, we analyze guidance as a bridge between different levels of supervision to segment classes as the union of instances.
Our segmentor concentrates different amounts of supervision of different types of classes into an efficient latent representation, non-locally propagates this supervision across images, and can be updated quickly and cumulatively when given more supervision.
Many tasks of scientific and practical interest require grouping pixels, such as cellular microscopy, medical imaging, and graphic design.
Furthermore, a single image might need to be segmented in several ways, for instance to first segment all people, then focus on a single person, and finally pick out their face.
Learning a particular type of segmentation, or even extending an existing model to a new task like a new semantic class, generally requires collecting and annotating a large amount of data and (re-)training a large model for many iterations.
Interactive segmentation with a supervisor in-the-loop can cope with less supervision, but requires at least a little annotation for each image, entailing significant effort over image collections or videos.
Faced with endless varieties of segmentation and countless images, yet only so much expertise and time, a segmentor should be able to learn from varying amounts of supervision and propagate that supervision to unlabeled pixels and images.We frame these needs as the problem of guided segmentation: given supervision from few or many images and pixels, collect and propagate this supervision to segment any given images, and do so quickly and with generality across tasks.
The amount of supervision may vary widely, from a lone annotated pixel, millions of pixels in a fully annotated image, or even more across a collection of images as in conventional supervised learning for segmentation.
The number of classes to be segmented may also vary depending on the task, such as when segmenting categories like cats vs. dogs, or when segmenting instances to group individual people.
Guided segmentation extends fewshot learning to the structured output setting, and the non-episodic accumulation of supervision as data is progressively annotated.
Guided segmentation broadens the scope of interactive segmentation by integrating supervision across images and segmenting unannotated images.As a first step towards solving this novel problem, we propose guided networks to extract guidance, a latent task representation, from variable amounts of supervision (see Figure 1 ).
To do so we meta-learn how to extract and follow guidance by training episodically on tasks synthesized from a large, fully annotated dataset.
Once trained, our model can quickly and cumulatively incorporate annotations to perform new tasks not seen during training.
Guided networks reconcile static and interactive modes of inference: a guided model is both able to make predictions on its own, like a fully supervised model, and to incorporate expert supervision for defining new tasks or correcting errors, Figure 1 : A guide g extracts a latent task representation z from an annotated image (red) for inference by f θ (x, z) on a different, unannotated image (blue).
like an interactive model.
Guidance, unlike static model parameters, does not require optimization to update: it can be quickly extended or corrected during inference.
Unlike annotations, guidance is latent and low-dimensional: it can be collected and propagated across images and episodes for inference without the supervisor in-the-loop as needed by interactive models.We evaluate our method on a variety of challenging segmentation problems in Section 5: interactive image segmentation, semantic segmentation, video object segmentation, and real-time interactive video segmentation, as shown in 2.
We further perform novel exploratory experiments aimed at understanding the characteristics and limits of guidance.
We compare guidance with standard supervised learning across the few-shot and many-shot extremes of support size to identify the boundary between few-shot and many-shot learning for segmentation.
We demonstrate that in some cases, our model can generalize to guide tasks at a different level of granularity, such as meta-learning from instance supervision and then guiding semantic segmentation of categories.
Guided segmentation unifies annotation-bound segmentation problems.
Guided networks reconcile task-driven and interactive inference by extracting guidance, a latent task representation, from any amount of supervision given.
With guidance our segmentor revolver can learn and infer tasks without optimization, improve its accuracy near-instantly with more supervision, and once-guided can segment new images without the supervisor in the loop.

assistant: text: We propose a meta-learning approach for guiding visual segmentation tasks from varying amounts of supervision.