# Source-Free Domain Adaptation for Semantic Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.16372 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.16372/

## Key facts

- Cited by 168 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 42 of its 55 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 Mar 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 42)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07004/) (2016)
- [The Cityscapes Dataset for Semantic Urban Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.01685/) (2016)
- [DeepLab: Semantic Image Segmentation with Deep Convolutional Nets, Atrous Convolution, and Fully Connected CRFs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.00915/) (2016)
- [Domain-Adversarial Training of Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.07818/) (2015)
- [Rethinking Atrous Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.05587/) (2017)
- [Unsupervised Representation Learning with Deep Convolutional Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.06434/) (2015)
- [SegNet: A Deep Convolutional Encoder-Decoder Architecture for Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.00561/) (2015)
- [CyCADA: Cycle-Consistent Adversarial Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.03213/) (2017)
- [Dual Attention Network for Scene Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.02983/) (2018)
- [Do We Really Need to Access the Source Data? Source Hypothesis Transfer for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.08546/) (2020)
- [Playing for Data: Ground Truth from Computer Games](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.02192/) (2016)
- [ADVENT: Adversarial Entropy Minimization for Domain Adaptation in Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.12833/) (2018)
- [Learning to Adapt Structured Output Space for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.10349/) (2018)
- [Dreaming to Distill: Data-free Knowledge Transfer via DeepInversion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.08795/) (2019)
- [Segmentation from Natural Language Expressions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.06180/) (2016)
- [Universal Source-Free Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04393/) (2020)
- [Data-Free Learning of Student Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01186/) (2019)
- [Unsupervised Intra-domain Adaptation for Semantic Segmentation through Self-Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07703/) (2020)
- [Domain Adaptation for Structured Output via Discriminative Patch Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.05427/) (2019)
- [Domain Adaptation for Semantic Segmentation with Maximum Squares Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.13589/) (2019)
- [Data-Free Knowledge Distillation for Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.07535/) (2017)
- [Zero-shot Knowledge Transfer via Adversarial Belief Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.09768/) (2019)
- [Zero-Shot Knowledge Distillation in Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.08114/) (2019)
- [ROAD: Reality Oriented Adaptation for Semantic Segmentation of Urban Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.11556/) (2017)
- [Data-Free Adversarial Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.11006/) (2019)
- [Domain Adaptation without Source Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.01524/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 168)

- [Continual Test-Time Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13591/) (2022)
- [A Comprehensive Survey on Test-Time Adaptation under Distribution Shifts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15361/) (2023)
- [Robust Test-Time Adaptation in Dynamic Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13899/) (2023)
- [Exploiting the Intrinsic Neighborhood Structure for Source-free Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.04202/) (2021)
- [Model Adaptation: Historical Contrastive Learning for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation without Source Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.03374/) (2021)
- [A Comprehensive Survey on Source-free Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.11803/) (2023)
- [Source-Free Domain Adaptation via Distribution Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.11257/) (2022)
- [Generalize then Adapt: Source-Free Domain Adaptive Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.11249/) (2021)
- [Source-Free Unsupervised Domain Adaptation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.00265/) (2022)
- [Domain Adaptation for Time Series Under Feature and Label Shifts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.03133/) (2023)
- [SITA: Single Image Test-time Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.02355/) (2021)
- [Balancing Discriminability and Transferability for Source-Free Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.08009/) (2022)
- [Towards Fewer Annotations: Active Learning via Region Impurity and Prediction Uncertainty for Domain Adaptive Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.12940/) (2021)
- [Instance Relation Graph Guided Source-Free Domain Adaptive Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15793/) (2022)
- [GradViT: Gradient Inversion of Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11894/) (2022)
- [Source-free Depth for Object Pop-out](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.05370/) (2022)
- [Test-time Batch Statistics Calibration for Covariate Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.04065/) (2021)
- [C-SFDA: A Curriculum Learning Aided Self-Training Framework for Efficient Source Free Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17132/) (2023)
- [When Source-Free Domain Adaptation Meets Learning with Noisy Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.13381/) (2023)
- [Source-Free Open Compound Domain Adaptation in Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03422/) (2021)
- [Cross-Domain Correlation Distillation for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation in Nighttime Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.00858/) (2022)
- [BMD: A General Class-balanced Multicentric Dynamic Prototype Strategy for Source-free Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02811/) (2022)
- [Towards Online Domain Adaptive Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.05289/) (2022)
- [GIPSO: Geometrically Informed Propagation for Online Adaptation in 3D LiDAR Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.09763/) (2022)
- [Learning Across Domains and Devices: Style-Driven Source-Free Domain Adaptation in Clustered Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02326/) (2022)
- [Transfer beyond the Field of View: Dense Panoramic Semantic Segmentation via Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.11062/) (2021)
- [Semantics, Distortion, and Style Matter: Towards Source-free UDA for Panoramic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.12505/) (2024)
- [Generative Domain Adaptation for Face Anti-Spoofing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.10015/) (2022)
- [TTA-COPE: Test-Time Adaptation for Category-Level Object Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16730/) (2023)
- [Data-Free Knowledge Transfer: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.15278/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) can tackle the challenge that convolutional neural network(CNN)-based approaches for semantic segmentation heavily rely on the pixel-level annotated data, which is labor-intensive. However, existing UDA approaches in this regard inevitably require the full access to source datasets to reduce the gap between the source and target domains during model adaptation, which are impractical in the real scenarios where the source datasets are private, and thus cannot be released along with the well-trained source models. To cope with this issue, we propose a source-free domain adaptation framework for semantic segmentation, namely SFDA, in which only a well-trained source model and an unlabeled target domain dataset are available for adaptation. SFDA not only enables to recover and preserve the source domain knowledge from the source model via knowledge transfer during model adaptation, but also distills valuable information from the target domain for self-supervised learning. The pixel- and patch-level optimization objectives tailored for semantic segmentation are seamlessly integrated in the framework. The extensive experimental results on numerous benchmark datasets highlight the effectiveness of our framework against the existing UDA approaches relying on source data.