DCM-SAM: Defect-Conditioned Mixture of LoRA Experts for NPU-Deployed AM Defect Segmentation

arXiv:2609.38811v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Metal additive manufacturing parts are inspected by X-ray computed tomography, where labelled data is scarce, the pores and inclusions that matter span a few pixels, and inspection must happen at the machine. We present DCM-SAM, a defect-conditioned adaptive mixture of LoRA experts: one frozen Segment Anything backbone carries a separate Conv-LoRA expert bank and mask decoder per defect class, each trained in its own pass, without prompts, on synthetic slices alone, updating only 4.4% of the parameters. On benchmarks that XCT-SAM reports, DCM-SAM improves on every baseline for both classes from a ViT-B backbone against their ViT-H, and reaches 64.2% pore IoU on real NIST scans having seen no real images during training. Deployment then exposes what adaptation work rarely measures: on a Qualcomm Hexagon NPU, ViT-H and ViT-L compile yet cannot allocate at 1024x1024 image resolution, since activations rather than weights exceed the device ceiling, and quantizing weights does not help. ViT-B alone runs, but the adapted encoder then fails to allocate where the stock one succeeds, until a numerically identical rewrite of the attention lets the complete DCM-SAM run in FP16 at 1024x1024, with no operator falling back to the CPU, masks within 0.01% of pixels of the FP32 reference. Code: https://github.com/MushfiqShovon/DCM-SAM.