# Robust Mutual Learning for Semi-supervised Semantic Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.00609 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.00609/

## Key facts

- Cited by 13 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 56 of its 65 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Jun 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 56)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [mixup: Beyond Empirical Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.09412/) (2017)
- [DeepLab: Semantic Image Segmentation with Deep Convolutional Nets, Atrous Convolution, and Fully Connected CRFs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.00915/) (2016)
- [CutMix: Regularization Strategy to Train Strong Classifiers with Localizable Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.04899/) (2019)
- [Unsupervised Learning of Visual Features by Contrasting Cluster Assignments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09882/) (2020)
- [RandAugment: Practical automated data augmentation with a reduced search space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.13719/) (2019)
- [FixMatch: Simplifying Semi-Supervised Learning with Consistency and Confidence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.07685/) (2020)
- [Improved Regularization of Convolutional Neural Networks with Cutout](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.04552/) (2017)
- [MixMatch: A Holistic Approach to Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02249/) (2019)
- [Rethinking Semantic Segmentation from a Sequence-to-Sequence Perspective with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15840/) (2020)
- [Self-training with Noisy Student improves ImageNet classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.04252/) (2019)
- [Unsupervised Data Augmentation for Consistency Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.12848/) (2019)
- [Co-teaching: Robust Training of Deep Neural Networks with Extremely Noisy Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.06872/) (2018)
- [Temporal Ensembling for Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02242/) (2016)
- [Deep Clustering for Unsupervised Learning of Visual Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.05520/) (2018)
- [Deep Networks with Stochastic Depth](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.09382/) (2016)
- [Virtual Adversarial Training: A Regularization Method for Supervised and Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.03976/) (2017)
- [Pseudo-Labeling and Confirmation Bias in Deep Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.02983/) (2019)
- [Mean teachers are better role models: Weight-averaged consistency targets improve semi-supervised deep learning results](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.01780/) (2017)
- [Regularization With Stochastic Transformations and Perturbations for Deep Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.04586/) (2016)
- [How does Disagreement Help Generalization against Label Corruption?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.04215/) (2019)
- [Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation with Cross-Consistency Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.09005/) (2020)
- [Meta Pseudo Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.10580/) (2020)
- [Rethinking Pre-training and Self-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.06882/) (2020)
- [ReMixMatch: Semi-Supervised Learning with Distribution Alignment and Augmentation Anchoring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.09785/) (2019)
- [S4L: Self-Supervised Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.03670/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [ST++: Make Self-training Work Better for Semi-supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.05095/) (2021)
- [Revisiting Weak-to-Strong Consistency in Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.09910/) (2022)
- [V3Det: Vast Vocabulary Visual Detection Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03752/) (2023)
- [UniMatch V2: Pushing the Limit of Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.10777/) (2024)
- [Correlation-Aware Mutual Learning for Semi-supervised Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.06312/) (2023)
- [Coaching a Teachable Student](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.10014/) (2023)
- [Conservative-Progressive Collaborative Learning for Semi-supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.16701/) (2022)
- [All Points Matter: Entropy-Regularized Distribution Alignment for Weakly-supervised 3D Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15832/) (2023)
- [Semi-supervised Semantic Segmentation with Mutual Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.11499/) (2022)
- [Semi-supervised Salient Object Detection with Effective Confidence Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.14019/) (2021)
- [Striving for Simplicity: Simple Yet Effective Prior-Aware Pseudo-Labeling for Semi-Supervised Ultrasound Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.13987/) (2025)
- [Towards Modality-agnostic Label-efficient Segmentation with Entropy-Regularized Distribution Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.16520/) (2024)
- [Leveraging CORAL-Correlation Consistency Network for Semi-Supervised Left Atrium MRI Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.15916/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent semi-supervised learning (SSL) methods are commonly based on pseudo labeling. Since the SSL performance is greatly influenced by the quality of pseudo labels, mutual learning has been proposed to effectively suppress the noises in the pseudo supervision. In this work, we propose robust mutual learning that improves the prior approach in two aspects. First, the vanilla mutual learners suffer from the coupling issue that models may converge to learn homogeneous knowledge. We resolve this issue by introducing mean teachers to generate mutual supervisions so that there is no direct interaction between the two students. We also show that strong data augmentations, model noises and heterogeneous network architectures are essential to alleviate the model coupling. Second, we notice that mutual learning fails to leverage the network's own ability for pseudo label refinement. Therefore, we introduce self-rectification that leverages the internal knowledge and explicitly rectifies the pseudo labels before the mutual teaching. Such self-rectification and mutual teaching collaboratively improve the pseudo label accuracy throughout the learning. The proposed robust mutual learning demonstrates state-of-the-art performance on semantic segmentation in low-data regime.