# TACS: Taxonomy Adaptive Cross-Domain Semantic Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.04813 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.04813/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 47 of its 62 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Sep 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 47)

- [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)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [mixup: Beyond Empirical Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.09412/) (2017)
- [Bootstrap your own latent: A new approach to self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07733/) (2020)
- [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)
- [CutMix: Regularization Strategy to Train Strong Classifiers with Localizable Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.04899/) (2019)
- [Improved Baselines with Momentum Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.04297/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Domain Adaptation by Backpropagation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.7495/) (2014)
- [Big Self-Supervised Models are Strong Semi-Supervised Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.10029/) (2020)
- [Learning Transferable Features with Deep Adaptation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.02791/) (2015)
- [CyCADA: Cycle-Consistent Adversarial Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.03213/) (2017)
- [Playing for Data: Ground Truth from Computer Games](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.02192/) (2016)
- [Contrastive Learning for Unpaired Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.15651/) (2020)
- [ADVENT: Adversarial Entropy Minimization for Domain Adaptation in Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.12833/) (2018)
- [Simple Copy-Paste is a Strong Data Augmentation Method for Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.07177/) (2020)
- [Learning to Adapt Structured Output Space for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.10349/) (2018)
- [FDA: Fourier Domain Adaptation for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05498/) (2020)
- [Domain Adaptive Faster R-CNN for Object Detection in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.03243/) (2018)
- [Contrastive Adaptation Network for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.00976/) (2019)
- [SCAN: Learning to Classify Images without Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12320/) (2020)
- [Semi-supervised Domain Adaptation via Minimax Entropy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.06487/) (2019)
- [FCNs in the Wild: Pixel-level Adversarial and Constraint-based Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.02649/) (2016)
- [Exploring Cross-Image Pixel Contrast for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.11939/) (2021)
- [DACS: Domain Adaptation via Cross-domain Mixed Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.08702/) (2020)
- [ClassMix: Segmentation-Based Data Augmentation for Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.07936/) (2020)
- [DetCo: Unsupervised Contrastive Learning for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.04803/) (2021)

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

- [Survey on Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Semantic Segmentation for Visual Perception in Automated Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.11928/) (2023)
- [To Adapt or Not to Adapt? Real-Time Adaptation for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15063/) (2023)
- [Taxonomy Adaptive Cross-Domain Adaptation in Medical Imaging via Optimization Trajectory Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.14709/) (2023)
- [Taxonomy-Structured Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.07874/) (2023)
- [Cross-Domain Semantic Segmentation on Inconsistent Taxonomy using VLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.02261/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Traditional domain adaptive semantic segmentation addresses the task of adapting a model to a novel target domain under limited or no additional supervision. While tackling the input domain gap, the standard domain adaptation settings assume no domain change in the output space. In semantic prediction tasks, different datasets are often labeled according to different semantic taxonomies. In many real-world settings, the target domain task requires a different taxonomy than the one imposed by the source domain. We therefore introduce the more general taxonomy adaptive cross-domain semantic segmentation (TACS) problem, allowing for inconsistent taxonomies between the two domains. We further propose an approach that jointly addresses the image-level and label-level domain adaptation. On the label-level, we employ a bilateral mixed sampling strategy to augment the target domain, and a relabelling method to unify and align the label spaces. We address the image-level domain gap by proposing an uncertainty-rectified contrastive learning method, leading to more domain-invariant and class-discriminative features. We extensively evaluate the effectiveness of our framework under different TACS settings: open taxonomy, coarse-to-fine taxonomy, and implicitly-overlapping taxonomy. Our approach outperforms the previous state-of-the-art by a large margin, while being capable of adapting to target taxonomies. Our implementation is publicly available at https://github.com/ETHRuiGong/TADA.