# Towards Single Stage Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.10309 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.10309/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 55 of its 88 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Jun 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 55)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Grad-CAM: Visual Explanations from Deep Networks via Gradient-based Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02391/) (2016)
- [SGDR: Stochastic Gradient Descent with Warm Restarts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.03983/) (2016)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [Fully Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4038/) (2014)
- [The Cityscapes Dataset for Semantic Urban Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.01685/) (2016)
- [Going Deeper with Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.4842/) (2014)
- [DeepLab: Semantic Image Segmentation with Deep Convolutional Nets, Atrous Convolution, and Fully Connected CRFs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.00915/) (2016)
- [Pyramid Scene Parsing Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01105/) (2016)
- [Learning Deep Features for Discriminative Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.04150/) (2015)
- [Group Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.08494/) (2018)
- [Dual Attention Network for Scene Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.02983/) (2018)
- [Spatial Pyramid Pooling in Deep Convolutional Networks for Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.4729/) (2014)
- [RefineNet: Multi-Path Refinement Networks for High-Resolution Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.06612/) (2016)
- [ScribbleSup: Scribble-Supervised Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.05144/) (2016)
- [Learning Pixel-level Semantic Affinity with Image-level Supervision for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.10464/) (2018)
- [Self-supervised Equivariant Attention Mechanism for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04581/) (2020)
- [What's the Point: Semantic Segmentation with Point Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02106/) (2015)
- [Context Encoding for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.08904/) (2018)
- [Weakly Supervised Learning of Instance Segmentation with Inter-pixel Relations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05044/) (2019)
- [BoxSup: Exploiting Bounding Boxes to Supervise Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.01640/) (2015)
- [Weakly- and Semi-Supervised Learning of a DCNN for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.02734/) (2015)
- [Wider or Deeper: Revisiting the ResNet Model for Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.10080/) (2016)
- [Weakly Supervised Deep Detection Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.02853/) (2015)
- [CityPersons: A Diverse Dataset for Pedestrian Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.05693/) (2017)
- [Single-Stage Semantic Segmentation from Image Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.08104/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [DiffuMask: Synthesizing Images with Pixel-level Annotations for Semantic Segmentation Using Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11681/) (2023)
- [DatasetDM: Synthesizing Data with Perception Annotations Using Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.06160/) (2023)
- [Learning Affinity from Attention: End-to-End Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02664/) (2022)
- [Enhancing SAM with Efficient Prompting and Preference Optimization for Semi-supervised Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.04639/) (2025)
- [SeeDiff: Off-the-Shelf Seeded Mask Generation from Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.19808/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The costly process of obtaining semantic segmentation labels has driven research towards weakly supervised semantic segmentation (WSSS) methods, using only image-level, point, or box labels. The lack of dense scene representation requires methods to increase complexity to obtain additional semantic information about the scene, often done through multiple stages of training and refinement. Current state-of-the-art (SOTA) models leverage image-level labels to produce class activation maps (CAMs) which go through multiple stages of refinement before they are thresholded to make pseudo-masks for supervision. The multi-stage approach is computationally expensive, and dependency on image-level labels for CAMs generation lacks generalizability to more complex scenes. In contrary, our method offers a single-stage approach generalizable to arbitrary dataset, that is trainable from scratch, without any dependency on pre-trained backbones, classification, or separate refinement tasks. We utilize point annotations to generate reliable, on-the-fly pseudo-masks through refined and filtered features. While our method requires point annotations that are only slightly more expensive than image-level annotations, we are to demonstrate SOTA performance on benchmark datasets (PascalVOC 2012), as well as significantly outperform other SOTA WSSS methods on recent real-world datasets (CRAID, CityPersons, IAD).