CausalCLIPSeg: Unlocking CLIP's Potential in Referring Medical Image Segmentation with Causal Intervention

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2503.15949v1
• Date: Thu, 20 Mar 2025 08:46:24 GMT
• Title: CausalCLIPSeg: Unlocking CLIP's Potential in Referring Medical Image Segmentation with Causal Intervention
• Authors: Yaxiong Chen, Minghong Wei, Zixuan Zheng, Jingliang Hu, Yilei Shi, Shengwu Xiong, Xiao Xiang Zhu, Lichao Mou,
• Abstract summary: We propose CausalCLIPSeg, an end-to-end framework for referring medical image segmentation.<n>Despite not being trained on medical data, we enforce CLIP's rich semantic space onto the medical domain.<n>To mitigate confounding bias that may cause the model to learn spurious correlations, CausalCLIPSeg introduces a causal intervention module.
• Score: 30.501326915750898
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Referring medical image segmentation targets delineating lesions indicated by textual descriptions. Aligning visual and textual cues is challenging due to their distinct data properties. Inspired by large-scale pre-trained vision-language models, we propose CausalCLIPSeg, an end-to-end framework for referring medical image segmentation that leverages CLIP. Despite not being trained on medical data, we enforce CLIP's rich semantic space onto the medical domain by a tailored cross-modal decoding method to achieve text-to-pixel alignment. Furthermore, to mitigate confounding bias that may cause the model to learn spurious correlations instead of meaningful causal relationships, CausalCLIPSeg introduces a causal intervention module which self-annotates confounders and excavates causal features from inputs for segmentation judgments. We also devise an adversarial min-max game to optimize causal features while penalizing confounding ones. Extensive experiments demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of our proposed method. Code is available at https://github.com/WUTCM-Lab/CausalCLIPSeg.

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