# CIAN: Cross-Image Affinity Net for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1811.10842 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.10842/

## Key facts

- Cited by 80 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 27 Nov 2018.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 80)

- [Multi-class Token Transformer for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02891/) (2022)
- [Anti-Adversarially Manipulated Attributions for Weakly and Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.08896/) (2021)
- [Railroad is not a Train: Saliency as Pseudo-pixel Supervision for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.08965/) (2021)
- [CLIP is Also an Efficient Segmenter: A Text-Driven Approach for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09506/) (2022)
- [BBAM: Bounding Box Attribution Map for Weakly Supervised Semantic and Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.08907/) (2021)
- [Large-scale Unsupervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03149/) (2021)
- [Self-supervised Image-specific Prototype Exploration for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02909/) (2022)
- [Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation by Pixel-to-Prototype Contrast](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07110/) (2021)
- [Leveraging Auxiliary Tasks with Affinity Learning for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.11787/) (2021)
- [Complementary Patch for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.03852/) (2021)
- [Reducing Information Bottleneck for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.06530/) (2021)
- [Regional Semantic Contrast and Aggregation for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09653/) (2022)
- [Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation using Out-of-Distribution Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.03860/) (2022)
- [Segment Anything Model (SAM) Enhanced Pseudo Labels for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.05803/) (2023)
- [Affinity Attention Graph Neural Network for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.04054/) (2021)
- [A Survey on Label-efficient Deep Image Segmentation: Bridging the Gap between Weak Supervision and Dense Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.01223/) (2022)
- [Max Pooling with Vision Transformers reconciles class and shape in weakly supervised semantic segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.17400/) (2022)
- [Weakly Supervised Temporal Adjacent Network for Language Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.16136/) (2021)
- [Threshold Matters in WSSS: Manipulating the Activation for the Robust and Accurate Segmentation Model Against Thresholds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16045/) (2022)
- [Expansion and Shrinkage of Localization for Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.07761/) (2022)
- [Foundation Model Assisted Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03585/) (2023)
- [Activation Modulation and Recalibration Scheme for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.08996/) (2021)
- [TransCAM: Transformer Attention-based CAM Refinement for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.07239/) (2022)
- [Out-of-Candidate Rectification for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12268/) (2022)
- [Adaptive Affinity Loss and Erroneous Pseudo-Label Refinement for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.01344/) (2021)
- [MCTformer+: Multi-Class Token Transformer for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.03005/) (2023)
- [Learning Self-Supervised Low-Rank Network for Single-Stage Weakly and Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10278/) (2022)
- [Pointly-Supervised Panoptic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.13950/) (2022)
- [Scribble-Supervised Semantic Segmentation by Uncertainty Reduction on Neural Representation and Self-Supervision on Neural Eigenspace](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09896/) (2021)
- [Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation with Visual Words Learning and Hybrid Pooling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.04812/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Weakly supervised semantic segmentation with only image-level labels saves large human effort to annotate pixel-level labels. Cutting-edge approaches rely on various innovative constraints and heuristic rules to generate the masks for every single image. Although great progress has been achieved by these methods, they treat each image independently and do not take account of the relationships across different images. In this paper, however, we argue that the cross-image relationship is vital for weakly supervised segmentation. Because it connects related regions across images, where supplementary representations can be propagated to obtain more consistent and integral regions. To leverage this information, we propose an end-to-end cross-image affinity module, which exploits pixel-level cross-image relationships with only image-level labels. By means of this, our approach achieves 64.3% and 65.3% mIoU on Pascal VOC 2012 validation and test set respectively, which is a new state-of-the-art result by only using image-level labels for weakly supervised semantic segmentation, demonstrating the superiority of our approach.