paper
arXiv cs.CV
November 9th, 2026 at 5:00 AM

Exemplar: Few-Shot Biomedical Segmentation That Fits in Seconds

arXiv:2609.03080v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Segmenting a new microscopy dataset usually means training a deep network on its annotations, and training again for every added image. Exemplar solves a segmentation readout in closed form and updates it exactly with each new mask in seconds, as accurately as networks trained for minutes. The updated readout is identical to a fit from all masks at once. Its linear readout combines frozen DINOv3 features, read at a magnification chosen from the masks, with classical filter responses at native resolution. Its regularisation and its pixel weighting are chosen exactly by leaving out one annotated image at a time, so none is set aside for validation. On ten biomedical datasets from cells to vessels and filaments, Exemplar is more accurate than every few-shot method that only applies a pretrained model, and on average than nnU-Net trained on the same masks. A fine-tuned Cellpose-SAM, the strongest baseline, is as accurate on average, but each of its fits takes a median of 25 minutes against 8.5 seconds, and each new mask means fine-tuning it again.

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Canonical link: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.03080