Skip to main content

Write a PREreview

HEADHUNTER: Training-Free Annotated Dataset Synthesis via Self-Guided Diffusion Transformer Attention Head Selection

Posted
Server
Preprints.org
DOI
10.20944/preprints202606.2132.v1

Pixel-level annotation remains a major bottleneck for semantic segmentation, motivating methods that synthesize image-label pairs directly from generative models. Prior synthetic dataset generators typically obtain pseudo-labels from cross-attention maps or learned decoders over generative features; however, recent text-to-image (T2I) models increasingly use multimodal diffusion transformers (MM-DiTs), where concept localization is no longer exposed through a single cross-attention pathway but instead distributed across many layers and attention heads. Existing MM-DiT localization methods address this by aggregating saliency across heads, but we observe that this averaging can dilute clean target localizers due to attention head heterogeneity. We introduce HEADHUNTER, a training-free, open-vocabulary segmentation framework that uses aggregate concept saliency as a self-guided proxy to select the single attention head that best localizes a queried textual concept, yielding cleaner segmentation masks. We then use HEADHUNTER to turn target classes into training data automatically: a large language model (LLM) diversifies prompts, an MM-DiT generates images, HEADHUNTER produces pseudo-labels, and a vision language model (VLM) verifies each image-mask pair before acceptance. On PASCAL VOC2012, HEADHUNTER achieves 79.2 mIoU in zero-shot single-class segmentation, outperforming MM-DiT head aggregation. Using only our generated image-label pairs, DeepLabV3 with a ResNet-101 backbone reaches 64.9 mIoU on VOC2012 validation, matching or outperforming comparable synthetic dataset generators and showing that the proposed pipeline produces effective dense labels without human intervention. Code: https://github.com/Rohanl2298/HEADHUNTER.

You can write a PREreview of HEADHUNTER: Training-Free Annotated Dataset Synthesis via Self-Guided Diffusion Transformer Attention Head Selection. A PREreview is a review of a preprint and can vary from a few sentences to a lengthy report, similar to a journal-organized peer-review report.

Before you start

We will ask you to log in with your ORCID iD. If you don’t have an iD, you can create one.

What is an ORCID iD?

An ORCID iD is a unique identifier that distinguishes you from everyone with the same or similar name.

Start now