Abstract: A computer-implemented method for partially supervised image segmentation having improved strong mask generalization includes obtaining, by a computing system including one or more computing devices, a machine-learned segmentation model, the machine-learned segmentation model including an anchor-free detector model and a deep mask head network, the deep mask head network including an encoder-decoder structure having a plurality of layers. The computer-implemented method includes obtaining, by the computing system, input data including tensor data. The computer-implemented method includes providing, by the computing system, the input data as input to the machine-learned segmentation model. The computer-implemented method includes receiving, by the computing system, output data from the machine-learned segmentation model, the output data including a segmentation of the tensor data, the segmentation including one or more instance masks.