CoRe-SAM3: Conditional Semantic--Visual Reconciliation for SAM3 Crack Segmentation

Abstract

Crack segmentation requires a model to recognize target semantics while accurately recovering thin, low-contrast, and topologically continuous local structures. Although SAM3 provides strong open-concept segmentation, its direct application to the crack domain still misses weak cracks, activates crack-like background regions, and produces local boundary errors. We first diagnose the functional differences between the internal prompt-conditioned semantic representation and native visual representation of SAM3 on five crack datasets. The results show that the semantic representation already carries most task information for crack prediction, whereas the utility of the visual representation depends on the current semantic state. Directly combining the two representations does not yield consistent gains. Based on this finding, we propose Conditional Semantic--Visual Reconciliation, termed CoRe. CoRe retains semantic prediction as the primary decision path, applies lightweight semantic calibration to adjust the target-domain decision mapping, and uses spatially aligned native visual evidence to generate a zero-initialized, bounded, and regularized conditional residual that selectively corrects existing predictions. Across five domains, CoRe-SAM3 improves the average Crack IoU from 62.34% to 70.47% and clDice from 81.98% to 89.24%, while introducing only 18.914 K trainable parameters. Prediction-transition analysis further shows that CoRe corrects an average of 34.38% of native errors, with a damage rate of only 0.23% on pixels correctly classified by native SAM3. These results demonstrate that constrained prediction correction based on the functional differences between internal representations provides an effective and parameter-efficient target-domain adaptation strategy for vision foundation models with strong task-specific semantic priors.