To use another vision backbone, like ConvNeXt, simply instantiate the model with the appropriate backbone:

from transformers import ConvNextConfig, UperNetConfig, UperNetForSemanticSegmentation
backbone_config = ConvNextConfig(out_features=["stage1", "stage2", "stage3", "stage4"])
config = UperNetConfig(backbone_config=backbone_config)
model = UperNetForSemanticSegmentation(config)