一点击中一类细胞,无需训练即可精准分割所有同类细胞。
One Click per Cell Type Suffices: Training-free Group Interaction for Cell Instance Segmentation

- 用单次点击引导多尺度特征聚类,递归扩展提示点覆盖全类细胞。
- 一点击中每类细胞,性能保留90%以上,跨模态泛化能力强。
- 适合病理图像密集细胞分割,无需训练,用户交互成本极低。
基于特定细胞数据集训练的细胞实例分割模型在分布外细胞类型上表现严重下降,而交互式基础模型虽能解决此问题,但对含数百至数千个密集排列实例的病理图像而言,逐实例提示成本过高。本文提出「分组提示」新范式,将交互分割从每实例 $O(N)$ 降至每类型 $O(T)$,即每类仅需一次点击即可分割全部实例。关键观察发现:冻结的 SAM 图像编码器在无任何提示时已将同类型细胞在特征空间中聚类,且该聚类在不同染色模态间保持不变。基于此,我们提出训练免费的「提示链(Chain-of-Prompts, CoP)」框架,通过非参数门控多尺度编码器特征识别可靠同类型位置,并选择最远空间距离的可靠点作为下一提示,以最大化覆盖范围。在11个基准测试中,CoP 在未见细胞类型与未见成像模态下均无需适配:每类一点击中,三类标注数据集性能保留超过90%,超越全监督方法;每图一点击中,八个涵盖H&E与非H&E成像的数据集性能保留超95%。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Cell instance segmentation models trained on cell-specific datasets suffer severe performance drops on out-of-distribution cell types, while interactive foundation models overcome this through per-instance prompting at a cost that is prohibitively expensive for histopathology images containing hundreds to thousands of densely packed instances. We introduce \textbf{Group Prompting}, a new paradigm that shifts interactive segmentation from per-instance $O(N)$ to per-type $O(T)$, where a single click per cell type suffices to segment all instances of that type. Our key observation is that the frozen image encoder of the Segment Anything Model (SAM) already clusters same-type cells in its feature space before any prompt is given, and that this clustering holds across staining modalities without any training. Exploiting this property, we propose \textbf{Chain-of-Prompts (CoP)}, a training-free framework that recursively expands a single user click by (1) identifying reliable same-type locations through non-parametric gating of multi-scale encoder features, and (2) selecting the most spatially distant reliable point as the next prompt to maximize coverage. On eleven benchmarks, CoP generalizes to both unseen cell types and unseen imaging modalities without any adaptation: with one click per type it retains over 90\% of per-instance performance on three cell-type-annotated datasets while surpassing fully-supervised methods, and with one click per image it retains over 95\% on eight datasets spanning both H\&E and non-H\&E imaging. Project Page: https://shjo-april.github.io/Chain-of-Prompts/
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