# Taking A Closer Look at Domain Shift: Category-level Adversaries for Semantics Consistent Domain Adaptation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1809.09478 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.09478/

## Key facts

- Cited by 295 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 25 Sep 2018.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 295)

- [DAFormer: Improving Network Architectures and Training Strategies for Domain-Adaptive Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14887/) (2021)
- [Prototypical Pseudo Label Denoising and Target Structure Learning for Domain Adaptive Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.10979/) (2021)
- [LoveDA: A Remote Sensing Land-Cover Dataset for Domain Adaptive Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.08733/) (2021)
- [FSDR: Frequency Space Domain Randomization for Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.02370/) (2021)
- [HRDA: Context-Aware High-Resolution Domain-Adaptive Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.13132/) (2022)
- [Model Adaptation: Historical Contrastive Learning for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation without Source Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.03374/) (2021)
- [Self-supervised Augmentation Consistency for Adapting Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.00097/) (2021)
- [The Norm Must Go On: Dynamic Unsupervised Domain Adaptation by Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.00463/) (2021)
- [Unsupervised Domain Adaptation of Object Detectors: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.13502/) (2021)
- [SePiCo: Semantic-Guided Pixel Contrast for Domain Adaptive Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.08808/) (2022)
- [OpenEarthMap: A Benchmark Dataset for Global High-Resolution Land Cover Mapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.10732/) (2022)
- [Generalize then Adapt: Source-Free Domain Adaptive Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.11249/) (2021)
- [Domain Adaptive Semantic Segmentation with Self-Supervised Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13613/) (2021)
- [PixMatch: Unsupervised Domain Adaptation via Pixelwise Consistency Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.08128/) (2021)
- [Context-Aware Mixup for Domain Adaptive Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.03557/) (2021)
- [Semantic-Aware Domain Generalized Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.00822/) (2022)
- [Re-distributing Biased Pseudo Labels for Semi-supervised Semantic Segmentation: A Baseline Investigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.11279/) (2021)
- [Unsupervised Multi-source Domain Adaptation Without Access to Source Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.01845/) (2021)
- [Bending Reality: Distortion-aware Transformers for Adapting to Panoramic Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01452/) (2022)
- [Adversarial Style Augmentation for Domain Generalized Urban-Scene Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.04892/) (2022)
- [Cross-Domain Adaptive Clustering for Semi-Supervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09415/) (2021)
- [Cross-Domain Gradient Discrepancy Minimization for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.04151/) (2021)
- [Category Contrast for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation in Visual Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.02885/) (2021)
- [Bridging the Domain Gap for Multi-Agent Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08451/) (2022)
- [Domain Adaptation for Time Series Under Feature and Label Shifts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.03133/) (2023)
- [Global and Local Texture Randomization for Synthetic-to-Real Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.02376/) (2021)
- [Towards Fewer Annotations: Active Learning via Region Impurity and Prediction Uncertainty for Domain Adaptive Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.12940/) (2021)
- [Capturing Omni-Range Context for Omnidirectional Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.05687/) (2021)
- [Pin the Memory: Learning to Generalize Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03609/) (2022)
- [RDA: Robust Domain Adaptation via Fourier Adversarial Attacking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.02874/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We consider the problem of unsupervised domain adaptation in semantic segmentation. The key in this campaign consists in reducing the domain shift, i.e., enforcing the data distributions of the two domains to be similar. A popular strategy is to align the marginal distribution in the feature space through adversarial learning. However, this global alignment strategy does not consider the local category-level feature distribution. A possible consequence of the global movement is that some categories which are originally well aligned between the source and target may be incorrectly mapped. To address this problem, this paper introduces a category-level adversarial network, aiming to enforce local semantic consistency during the trend of global alignment. Our idea is to take a close look at the category-level data distribution and align each class with an adaptive adversarial loss. Specifically, we reduce the weight of the adversarial loss for category-level aligned features while increasing the adversarial force for those poorly aligned. In this process, we decide how well a feature is category-level aligned between source and target by a co-training approach. In two domain adaptation tasks, i.e., GTA5 -> Cityscapes and SYNTHIA -> Cityscapes, we validate that the proposed method matches the state of the art in segmentation accuracy.