Adapt Foundational Segmentation Models with Heterogeneous Searching Space

Foundation Segmentation Models (FSMs) show suboptimal performance on unconventional image domains like camouflage objects. Fine-tuning is often impractical due to data preparation challenges, time limits, and optimization issues. To boost segmentation performance while keeping zero-shot features, one approach is pre-augmenting images for the segmentation model. However, existing image augmentations mainly depend on rule-based methods, restricting augmentation effectiveness. Though learning-based methods can diversify augmentation, rule-based ones are degree-describable (e.g., slight/intense brightening), while learning-based methods usually predict non-degree-describable ground truths (e.g., depth estimation), creating a heterogeneous search space when combined. To this end, we propose an "Augmenting-to-Adapt" paradigm, replacing traditional rule-based augmentation with an optimal heterogeneous augmentation policy to enhance segmentation. Our method uses 32 augmentation techniques (22 rule-based, 10 learning-based) to ease parameter misalignment, forming a robust, multi-discrete heterogeneous search space.To apply the optimal policy in real-world scenarios, we distill the augmentation process to speed up the preprocess. Extensive evaluations across diverse datasets and domains show our method significantly improves model adaptation with a domain-specific augmentation strategy. We will release our code to support further research.