# Rectifying Pseudo Label Learning via Uncertainty Estimation for Domain Adaptive Semantic Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.03773 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.03773/

## Key facts

- Cited by 222 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 8 Mar 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 222)

- [FlexMatch: Boosting Semi-Supervised Learning with Curriculum Pseudo Labeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.08263/) (2021)
- [In Defense of Pseudo-Labeling: An Uncertainty-Aware Pseudo-label Selection Framework for Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.06329/) (2021)
- [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)
- [FreeMatch: Self-adaptive Thresholding for Semi-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.07246/) (2022)
- [MIC: Masked Image Consistency for Context-Enhanced Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.01322/) (2022)
- [HRDA: Context-Aware High-Resolution Domain-Adaptive Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.13132/) (2022)
- [Self-supervised Augmentation Consistency for Adapting Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.00097/) (2021)
- [CDTrans: Cross-domain Transformer for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.06165/) (2021)
- [Mutual Consistency Learning for Semi-supervised Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.09960/) (2021)
- [Semi-supervised Left Atrium Segmentation with Mutual Consistency Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.02911/) (2021)
- [SePiCo: Semantic-Guided Pixel Contrast for Domain Adaptive Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.08808/) (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)
- [VL-Uncertainty: Detecting Hallucination in Large Vision-Language Model via Uncertainty Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.11919/) (2024)
- [Bending Reality: Distortion-aware Transformers for Adapting to Panoramic Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01452/) (2022)
- [ICE: Inter-instance Contrastive Encoding for Unsupervised Person Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.16364/) (2021)
- [Towards Fewer Annotations: Active Learning via Region Impurity and Prediction Uncertainty for Domain Adaptive Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.12940/) (2021)
- [StyleAdv: Meta Style Adversarial Training for Cross-Domain Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.09309/) (2023)
- [Pin the Memory: Learning to Generalize Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03609/) (2022)
- [Behind Every Domain There is a Shift: Adapting Distortion-aware Vision Transformers for Panoramic Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.11860/) (2022)
- [Uncertainty-guided Source-free Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.07591/) (2022)
- [DSP: Dual Soft-Paste for Unsupervised Domain Adaptive Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.09600/) (2021)
- [Composed Image Retrieval with Text Feedback via Multi-grained Uncertainty Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.07394/) (2022)
- [MetaCorrection: Domain-aware Meta Loss Correction for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation in Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.05254/) (2021)
- [Source-Free Open Compound Domain Adaptation in Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03422/) (2021)
- [Class-incremental Novel Class Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.08605/) (2022)
- [PiPa: Pixel- and Patch-wise Self-supervised Learning for Domain Adaptative Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.07609/) (2022)
- [All for One, and One for All: UrbanSyn Dataset, the third Musketeer of Synthetic Driving Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.12176/) (2023)
- [ASM-Loc: Action-aware Segment Modeling for Weakly-Supervised Temporal Action Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15187/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper focuses on the unsupervised domain adaptation of transferring the knowledge from the source domain to the target domain in the context of semantic segmentation. Existing approaches usually regard the pseudo label as the ground truth to fully exploit the unlabeled target-domain data. Yet the pseudo labels of the target-domain data are usually predicted by the model trained on the source domain. Thus, the generated labels inevitably contain the incorrect prediction due to the discrepancy between the training domain and the test domain, which could be transferred to the final adapted model and largely compromises the training process. To overcome the problem, this paper proposes to explicitly estimate the prediction uncertainty during training to rectify the pseudo label learning for unsupervised semantic segmentation adaptation. Given the input image, the model outputs the semantic segmentation prediction as well as the uncertainty of the prediction. Specifically, we model the uncertainty via the prediction variance and involve the uncertainty into the optimization objective. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed method, we evaluate the proposed method on two prevalent synthetic-to-real semantic segmentation benchmarks, i.e., GTA5 -> Cityscapes and SYNTHIA -> Cityscapes, as well as one cross-city benchmark, i.e., Cityscapes -> Oxford RobotCar. We demonstrate through extensive experiments that the proposed approach (1) dynamically sets different confidence thresholds according to the prediction variance, (2) rectifies the learning from noisy pseudo labels, and (3) achieves significant improvements over the conventional pseudo label learning and yields competitive performance on all three benchmarks.