Towards Continual Universal Segmentation

Despite the significant progress in continual image segmentation, existing arts still strive to balance between stability and plasticity. Additionally, they are specialist to specific tasks and models, which hinders the extension to more general situations. In this work, we present CUE, a novel Continual Universal sEgmentation pipeline that not only inherently tackles the stability-plasticity dilemma, but unifies any segmentation across tasks and models as well. Our key insight: any segmentation task can be reformulated as an understanding-then-refinement paradigm, which is inspired by humans' visual perception system to first perform high-level semantic understanding, then focus on low-level vision cues. We claim three desiderata for this design: Continuity by inherently avoiding the stability-plasticity dilemma via exploiting the natural differences between high-level and low-level knowledge. Generality by unifying and simplifying the landscape towards various segmentation tasks. Efficiency as an interesting by-product by significantly reducing the research effort. Our resulting model, built upon this pipeline by complementary expert models, shows significant improvements over previous state-of-the-arts across various segmentation tasks and datasets. We believe that our work is a significant step towards making continual segmentation more universal and practicable.