<p>Open-vocabulary semantic segmentation (OVSS) aims to segment and recognize objects universally. Trained on extensive high-quality segmentation data, the segment anything model (SAM) has demonstrated remarkable universal segmentation capabilities, offering valuable support for OVSS. Although previous methods have made progress in leveraging SAM for OVSS, there are still some challenges: 1) SAM’s tendency to over-segment, and 2) hard combinations between fixed masks and labels. This paper introduces a novel mask-injected framework, SAM-MI, which effectively integrates SAM with OVSS models to address these challenges. Initially, SAM-MI employs a text-guided sparse point prompter to sample sparse prompts for SAM instead of previous dense grid-like prompts, thus significantly accelerating the mask generation process. The framework then introduces shallow mask aggregation (SMAgg) to merge partial masks to mitigate SAM’s over-segmentation issue. Finally, decoupled mask injection (DMI) incorporates SAM-generated masks for guidance at low-frequency and high-frequency separately, rather than directly combining them with labels. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks validate the superiority of SAM-MI. Notably, the proposed method achieves a 16.7% relative improvement in mIoU over grounded-SAM on the MESS benchmark, along with a 1.6 × speedup. We hope SAM-MI can serve as an alternative methodology to effectively equip the OVSS model with SAM.</p>