“Object Segmentation Without Labels With Large-Scale Generative Models”, Andrey Voynov, Stanislav Morozov, Artem Babenko2020-06-08 (, ; backlinks; similar)⁠:

The recent rise of unsupervised and self-supervised learning has dramatically reduced the dependency on labeled data, providing effective image representations for transfer to downstream vision tasks.

Furthermore, recent works employed these representations in a fully unsupervised setup for image classification, reducing the need for human labels on the fine-tuning stage as well.

This work demonstrates that large-scale unsupervised models can also perform a more challenging object segmentation task, requiring neither pixel-level nor image-level labeling. Namely, we show that recent unsupervised GANs allow to differentiate between foreground/background pixels, providing high-quality saliency masks.

By extensive comparison on standard benchmarks, we outperform existing unsupervised alternatives for object segmentation, achieving new state-of-the-art.