# Differential Treatment for Stuff and Things: A Simple Unsupervised Domain Adaptation Method for Semantic Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.08040 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.08040/

## Key facts

- Cited by 126 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 18 Mar 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 126)

- [DAFormer: Improving Network Architectures and Training Strategies for Domain-Adaptive Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14887/) (2021)
- [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)
- [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)
- [DANNet: A One-Stage Domain Adaptation Network for Unsupervised Nighttime Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.10834/) (2021)
- [Domain Adaptive Semantic Segmentation with Self-Supervised Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13613/) (2021)
- [Context-Aware Mixup for Domain Adaptive Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.03557/) (2021)
- [Bending Reality: Distortion-aware Transformers for Adapting to Panoramic Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01452/) (2022)
- [Category Contrast for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation in Visual Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.02885/) (2021)
- [Towards Fewer Annotations: Active Learning via Region Impurity and Prediction Uncertainty for Domain Adaptive Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.12940/) (2021)
- [RDA: Robust Domain Adaptation via Fourier Adversarial Attacking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.02874/) (2021)
- [Behind Every Domain There is a Shift: Adapting Distortion-aware Vision Transformers for Panoramic Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.11860/) (2022)
- [MetaCorrection: Domain-aware Meta Loss Correction for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation in Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.05254/) (2021)
- [Multi-Target Domain Adaptation with Collaborative Consistency Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03418/) (2021)
- [Cross-View Regularization for Domain Adaptive Panoptic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.02584/) (2021)
- [ConDA: Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for LiDAR Segmentation via Regularized Domain Concatenation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.15242/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Spectral Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.06112/) (2021)
- [Coarse-to-Fine Domain Adaptive Semantic Segmentation with Photometric Alignment and Category-Center Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13041/) (2021)
- [Semantics, Distortion, and Style Matter: Towards Source-free UDA for Panoramic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.12505/) (2024)
- [ToAlign: Task-oriented Alignment for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.10812/) (2021)
- [LabOR: Labeling Only if Required for Domain Adaptive Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05570/) (2021)
- [Refign: Align and Refine for Adaptation of Semantic Segmentation to Adverse Conditions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.06825/) (2022)
- [PIT: Position-Invariant Transform for Cross-FoV Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07142/) (2021)
- [Domain Adaptive Semantic Segmentation without Source Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.06484/) (2021)
- [Self-Adversarial Disentangling for Specific Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.03553/) (2021)
- [Survey on Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Semantic Segmentation for Visual Perception in Automated Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.11928/) (2023)
- [Generalization by Adaptation: Diffusion-Based Domain Extension for Domain-Generalized Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.01850/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We consider the problem of unsupervised domain adaptation for semantic segmentation by easing the domain shift between the source domain (synthetic data) and the target domain (real data) in this work. State-of-the-art approaches prove that performing semantic-level alignment is helpful in tackling the domain shift issue. Based on the observation that stuff categories usually share similar appearances across images of different domains while things (i.e. object instances) have much larger differences, we propose to improve the semantic-level alignment with different strategies for stuff regions and for things: 1) for the stuff categories, we generate feature representation for each class and conduct the alignment operation from the target domain to the source domain; 2) for the thing categories, we generate feature representation for each individual instance and encourage the instance in the target domain to align with the most similar one in the source domain. In this way, the individual differences within thing categories will also be considered to alleviate over-alignment. In addition to our proposed method, we further reveal the reason why the current adversarial loss is often unstable in minimizing the distribution discrepancy and show that our method can help ease this issue by minimizing the most similar stuff and instance features between the source and the target domains. We conduct extensive experiments in two unsupervised domain adaptation tasks, i.e. GTA5 to Cityscapes and SYNTHIA to Cityscapes, and achieve the new state-of-the-art segmentation accuracy.