# Domain Adaptive Semantic Segmentation without Source Data

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.06484 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.06484/

## Key facts

- Cited by 30 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 37 of its 53 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Oct 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 37)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [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)
- [Learning Transferable Features with Deep Adaptation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.02791/) (2015)
- [Deep CORAL: Correlation Alignment for Deep Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.01719/) (2016)
- [CyCADA: Cycle-Consistent Adversarial Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.03213/) (2017)
- [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)
- [Maximum Classifier Discrepancy for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.02560/) (2017)
- [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)
- [FDA: Fourier Domain Adaptation for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05498/) (2020)
- [Confidence Regularized Self-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.09822/) (2019)
- [Taking A Closer Look at Domain Shift: Category-level Adversaries for Semantics Consistent Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.09478/) (2018)
- [Rectifying Pseudo Label Learning via Uncertainty Estimation for Domain Adaptive Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.03773/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Intra-domain Adaptation for Semantic Segmentation through Self-Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07703/) (2020)
- [NLNL: Negative Learning for Noisy Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07387/) (2019)
- [Category Anchor-Guided Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13049/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Differential Treatment for Stuff and Things: A Simple Unsupervised Domain Adaptation Method for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.08040/) (2020)
- [CrDoCo: Pixel-level Domain Transfer with Cross-Domain Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.03182/) (2020)
- [All about Structure: Adapting Structural Information across Domains for Boosting Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.12212/) (2019)
- [Constructing Self-motivated Pyramid Curriculums for Cross-Domain Semantic Segmentation: A Non-Adversarial Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.09547/) (2019)
- [Unsupervised and Semi-supervised Learning with Categorical Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.06390/) (2015)
- [Learning from Complementary Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07541/) (2017)
- [Domain Adaptation without Source Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.01524/) (2020)
- [A Free Lunch for Unsupervised Domain Adaptive Object Detection without Source Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.05400/) (2020)
- [Maximum Density Divergence for Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.12615/) (2020)
- [Fully Convolutional Adaptation Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.08286/) (2018)

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

- [A Comprehensive Survey on Test-Time Adaptation under Distribution Shifts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15361/) (2023)
- [A Comprehensive Survey on Source-free Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.11803/) (2023)
- [Towards Fewer Annotations: Active Learning via Region Impurity and Prediction Uncertainty for Domain Adaptive Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.12940/) (2021)
- [PiPa: Pixel- and Patch-wise Self-supervised Learning for Domain Adaptative Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.07609/) (2022)
- [Data-Free Knowledge Transfer: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.15278/) (2021)
- [SATS: Self-Attention Transfer for Continual Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.07667/) (2022)
- [FVP: Fourier Visual Prompting for Source-Free Unsupervised Domain Adaptation of Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.13672/) (2023)
- [Hyperbolic Active Learning for Semantic Segmentation under Domain Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.11180/) (2023)
- [Memory Consistent Unsupervised Off-the-Shelf Model Adaptation for Source-Relaxed Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.07910/) (2022)
- [Deep Learning for Cross-Domain Few-Shot Visual Recognition: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08557/) (2023)
- [Cal-SFDA: Source-Free Domain-adaptive Semantic Segmentation with Differentiable Expected Calibration Error](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.03003/) (2023)
- [Towards Source-free Domain Adaptive Semantic Segmentation via Importance-aware and Prototype-contrast Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.01598/) (2023)
- [Source-Free Domain Adaptation for RGB-D Semantic Segmentation with Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14269/) (2023)
- [Iterative Loop Method Combining Active and Semi-Supervised Learning for Domain Adaptive Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.13361/) (2023)
- [Unsupervised Adaptation of Semantic Segmentation Models without Source Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.02359/) (2021)
- [SVIP: Semantically Contextualized Visual Patches for Zero-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.10252/) (2025)
- [Self-training via Metric Learning for Source-Free Domain Adaptation of Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04227/) (2022)
- [AdaptGuard: Defending Against Universal Attacks for Model Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.10594/) (2023)
- [Channel-Selective Normalization for Label-Shift Robust Test-Time Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.04958/) (2024)
- [Distributed Zero-Shot Learning for Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.08170/) (2025)
- [Accelerating Multimodal Large Language Models with Prior-Corrected Token Reduction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.24156/) (2026)
- [Cross-Modality Domain Adaptation for Freespace Detection: A Simple yet Effective Baseline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02991/) (2022)
- [Density Matters: Improved Core-set for Active Domain Adaptive Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.09595/) (2023)
- [PiPa++: Towards Unification of Domain Adaptive Semantic Segmentation via Self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.17101/) (2024)
- [Spectral Evolution-Guided Token Pruning in Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.24165/) (2026)
- [SL: Stable Learning in Source-Free Domain Adaption for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.12580/) (2023)
- [Local-Global Pseudo-label Correction for Source-free Domain Adaptive Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.14312/) (2023)
- [Online Continual Domain Adaptation for Semantic Image Segmentation Using Internal Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.01035/) (2024)
- [Prototype-Based Pseudo-Label Denoising for Source-Free Domain Adaptation in Remote Sensing Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.16942/) (2025)
- [Rethinking the Need for Source Models: Source-Free Domain Adaptation from Scratch Guided by a Vision-Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.02604/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Domain adaptive semantic segmentation is recognized as a promising technique to alleviate the domain shift between the labeled source domain and the unlabeled target domain in many real-world applications, such as automatic pilot. However, large amounts of source domain data often introduce significant costs in storage and training, and sometimes the source data is inaccessible due to privacy policies. To address these problems, we investigate domain adaptive semantic segmentation without source data, which assumes that the model is pre-trained on the source domain, and then adapting to the target domain without accessing source data anymore. Since there is no supervision from the source domain data, many self-training methods tend to fall into the ``winner-takes-all'' dilemma, where the it majority classes totally dominate the segmentation networks and the networks fail to classify the it minority classes. Consequently, we propose an effective framework for this challenging problem with two components: positive learning and negative learning. In positive learning, we select the class-balanced pseudo-labeled pixels with intra-class threshold, while in negative learning, for each pixel, we investigate which category the pixel does not belong to with the proposed heuristic complementary label selection. Notably, our framework can be easily implemented and incorporated with other methods to further enhance the performance. Extensive experiments on two widely-used synthetic-to-real benchmarks demonstrate our claims and the effectiveness of our framework, which outperforms the baseline with a large margin. Code is available at urlhttps://github.com/fumyou13/LDBE.