BiPA: Bilevel Prompt Adaptation for Underwater Instance Segmentation

Abstract

Underwater instance segmentation is essential for fine-grained scene understanding. However, underwater imagery exhibits a strong domain gap from in-air vision due to severe degradation (e.g., turbidity). Consequently, despite its general segmentation ability, SAM degrades sharply underwater. In this work, we propose BiPA, which effectively adapts SAM to the underwater domain. To be concrete, we construct an underwater SAM with dual prompts and introduce a foreground-attentive injection block to enhance local foreground representation. We formulate dense prompt learning as a bilevel optimization, explicitly capturing the mutual dependency between prompt and model. To make this tractable, we design a two-stage learning strategy. The first stage adapts the dense prompt itself, updating it with Bayesian optimization to learn efficiently. The second stage fine-tunes the model parameters under the frozen optimized prompt, which finally enables effective cross-domain adaptation. Extensive experiments and analyses verify the superiority and efficiency of BiPA. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/ZeAstra/BiPA.