MatchMask: Mask-Centric Generative Data Augmentation for Label-Scarce Semantic Segmentation

Current semantic segmentation models are very data-hungry and require massive costly pixel-wise human annotations. Generative data augmentation, which scales the train set using generative models, provides a potential remedy. In this paper, we propose MatchMask, a novel mask-centric generative data augmentation approach tailored for labelscarce semantic segmentation. By leveraging a limited set of labeled semantic masks, MatchMask generates diverse, realistic, and well-aligned image-mask pairs, thereby enhancing the performance of semantic segmentation models. Specifically, to adapt existing text-to-image models for semantic image synthesis in the few-shot setting, we first propose a Gradient Probe Method to investigate the role of each layer in the diffusion model. On this basis, a lightweight LoRAstyle adapter is designed for critical layers to enable efficient adaptation, coupled with a Layer-adaptive Cross-attention Fusion mechanism. Meanwhile, we present a robust relative filtering principle to suppress incorrectly synthesized regions. Moreover, the proposed approach is extended to MatchMask++ in the semi-supervised setting to take advantage of additional unlabeled data. Experimental results on PASCAL VOC, COCO and ADE20K demonstrate that Match-Mask remarkably enhances the performance of segmentation models, surpassing prior data augmentation techniques in various benchmarks, e.g., 67.5%→74.3% mIoU on PASCAL VOC. Our code is available at MatchMask.