VespaSeg: A Resource-Aware Ground-then-Segment Pipeline for Referring Expression Segmentation

Abstract:Referring expression segmentation requires language conditioned localization and pixel-accurate masks, but monolithic models can be costly to deploy. We present VespaSeg, a modular pipeline that grounds a text query with a compact vision-language model and converts the predicted box to a mask with MobileSAM. We study Florence-2-base, Florence-2-large, and Moondream2 grounders together with targeted adaptation of the grounding and segmentation stages. Under a repository-specific RefCOCO validation protocol containing the first expression for each of 3,811 referenced-object records, the adapted Florence-2-base pipeline obtains 73.64 mean intersection over union (mIoU) and 84.60 precision at IoU 0.5. On an NVIDIA RTX 6000 Ada GPU it processes 22.8 cached-image queries per second with 2.20 GB mean allocated GPU memory. A matched 500-query comparison gives 73.73 mIoU for Florence-2-base and 72.82 for Florence-2-large, while the base model is 1.70 times faster and uses 1.17 GB less allocated memory. Ablations show that ground-truth-box adaptation raises MobileSAM mIoU from 82.22 to 86.61 and that reducing the Florence-2 output-token budget from 64 to 32 preserves accuracy. These results support compact, modular grounding and segmentation, while also exposing the need for evaluation on the complete standard RefCOCO expression splits and deployment hardware.

5 pages, 3 figures. Code and result artifacts: this https URL

Robotics (cs.RO)

arXiv:2608.01077 [cs.RO]

(or arXiv:2608.01077v1 [cs.RO] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.01077 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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