Refining Context-Entangled Content Segmentation via Curriculum Selection and Anti-Curriculum Promotion

TL;DR

This paper introduces CurriSeg, a dual-phase learning framework inspired by biological principles, which improves context-entangled content segmentation by dynamically selecting training data and promoting low-frequency structural cues, leading to more robust models.

Contribution

The paper proposes a novel dual-phase curriculum and anti-curriculum learning framework, CurriSeg, that enhances segmentation robustness without increasing model complexity or training time.

Findings

Achieves consistent improvements across diverse benchmarks.

Effectively distinguishes informative samples from noisy data.

Strengthens generalization by emphasizing low-frequency cues.

Abstract

Biological learning proceeds from easy to difficult tasks, gradually reinforcing perception and robustness. Inspired by this principle, we address Context-Entangled Content Segmentation (CECS), a challenging setting where objects share intrinsic visual patterns with their surroundings, as in camouflaged object detection. Conventional segmentation networks predominantly rely on architectural enhancements but often ignore the learning dynamics that govern robustness under entangled data distributions. We introduce CurriSeg, a dual-phase learning framework that unifies curriculum and anti-curriculum principles to improve representation reliability. In the Curriculum Selection phase, CurriSeg dynamically selects training data based on the temporal statistics of sample losses, distinguishing hard-but-informative samples from noisy or ambiguous ones, thus enabling stable capability enhancement. In the Anti-Curriculum Promotion phase, we design Spectral-Blindness Fine-Tuning, which suppresses high-frequency components to enforce dependence on low-frequency structural and contextual cues and thus strengthens generalization. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CurriSeg achieves consistent improvements across diverse CECS benchmarks without adding parameters or increasing total training time, offering a principled view of how progression and challenge interplay to foster robust and context-aware segmentation. Code will be released.