PixelUp: Zero-Shot Semantic Feature Upsampling for Fine-Grained Vision Tasks
arXiv:2608.02792v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Self-supervised Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) have become essential backbones for downstream tasks due to their strong and transferable visual representations. However, their patch-token-level features are often too coarse for dense prediction tasks such as semantic segmentation and depth estimation when accurate fine-grained predictions are required. Feature upsampling methods have been developed to recover pixel-level detail but still face limitations. Learnable upsamplers are often designed for a specific encoders and must be retrained for different encoders. Image-guided methods that use shallow pixel encoders often introduce textural artifacts and lack the semantic guidance needed for accurate downstream predictions. We introduce PixelUp, a zero-shot VFM-agnostic upsampler achieving semantic awareness through a coarse-to-fine chain of windowed cross-attention architecture guided by multi-scale semantic features. We demonstrate that PixelUp outperforms both VFM-specific and VFM-agnostic upsamplers, achieving state-of-the-art performance on dense prediction tasks with an average improvement of +1.2 mIoU on semantic segmentation and +0.25 $\delta_1$, on NYUv2 depth estimation across VFMs. PixelUp further improves training-free open-vocabulary and unsupervised semantic segmentation by an average of +1.3 mIoU and +0.5 mIoU, respectively. Code available at https://pixelup-project.vercel.app/
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[Submitted on 3 Aug 2026]
Title:PixelUp: Zero-Shot Semantic Feature Upsampling for Fine-Grained Vision Tasks
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Abstract:Self-supervised Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) have become essential backbones for downstream tasks due to their strong and transferable visual representations. However, their patch-token-level features are often too coarse for dense prediction tasks such as semantic segmentation and depth estimation when accurate fine-grained predictions are required. Feature upsampling methods have been developed to recover pixel-level detail but still face limitations. Learnable upsamplers are often designed for a specific encoders and must be retrained for different encoders. Image-guided methods that use shallow pixel encoders often introduce textural artifacts and lack the semantic guidance needed for accurate downstream predictions. We introduce PixelUp, a zero-shot VFM-agnostic upsampler achieving semantic awareness through a coarse-to-fine chain of windowed cross-attention architecture guided by multi-scale semantic features. We demonstrate that PixelUp outperforms both VFM-specific and VFM-agnostic upsamplers, achieving state-of-the-art performance on dense prediction tasks with an average improvement of +1.2 mIoU on semantic segmentation and +0.25 $\delta_1$, on NYUv2 depth estimation across VFMs. PixelUp further improves training-free open-vocabulary and unsupervised semantic segmentation by an average of +1.3 mIoU and +0.5 mIoU, respectively. Code available at this https URL
Subjects:
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)
Cite as: arXiv:2608.02792 [cs.CV]
(or arXiv:2608.02792v1 [cs.CV] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.02792
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
Submission history
From: Deepank Singh [view email] [v1] Mon, 3 Aug 2026 18:42:22 UTC (11,360 KB)
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