# Semi-supervised Domain Adaptation for Semantic Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.10639 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.10639/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 36 of its 46 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Oct 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 36)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [mixup: Beyond Empirical Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.09412/) (2017)
- [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)
- [CutMix: Regularization Strategy to Train Strong Classifiers with Localizable Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.04899/) (2019)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Confidence Regularized Self-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.09822/) (2019)
- [Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation with Cross-Consistency Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.09005/) (2020)
- [Semi-supervised Domain Adaptation via Minimax Entropy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.06487/) (2019)
- [Bidirectional Learning for Domain Adaptation of Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.10620/) (2019)
- [Prototypical Pseudo Label Denoising and Target Structure Learning for Domain Adaptive Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.10979/) (2021)
- [Auto-DeepLab: Hierarchical Neural Architecture Search for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.02985/) (2019)
- [FCNs in the Wild: Pixel-level Adversarial and Constraint-based Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.02649/) (2016)
- [ClassMix: Segmentation-Based Data Augmentation for Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.07936/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Intra-domain Adaptation for Semantic Segmentation through Self-Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07703/) (2020)
- [Adversarial Learning for Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.07934/) (2018)
- [Gated-SCNN: Gated Shape CNNs for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.05740/) (2019)
- [Learning Texture Invariant Representation for Domain Adaptation of Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.00867/) (2020)
- [Category Anchor-Guided Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13049/) (2019)
- [Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation with High- and Low-level Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.05724/) (2019)
- [Domain Adaptation for Semantic Segmentation with Maximum Squares Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.13589/) (2019)
- [DCAN: Dual Channel-wise Alignment Networks for Unsupervised Scene Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.05827/) (2018)
- [DADA: Depth-aware Domain Adaptation in Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01886/) (2019)
- [ROAD: Reality Oriented Adaptation for Semantic Segmentation of Urban Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.11556/) (2017)
- [Attract, Perturb, and Explore: Learning a Feature Alignment Network for Semi-supervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.09375/) (2020)
- [Multi-Source Domain Adaptation with Collaborative Learning for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.04717/) (2021)
- [Structured Consistency Loss for semi-supervised semantic segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.04647/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Survey on Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Semantic Segmentation for Visual Perception in Automated Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.11928/) (2023)
- [Semi-supervised domain adaptation with CycleGAN guided by a downstream task loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.08815/) (2022)
- [SemiDAViL: Semi-supervised Domain Adaptation with Vision-Language Guidance for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.06389/) (2025)
- [CD-Buffer: Complementary Dual-Buffer Framework for Test-Time Adaptation in Adverse Weather Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.26092/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Deep learning approaches for semantic segmentation rely primarily on supervised learning approaches and require substantial efforts in producing pixel-level annotations. Further, such approaches may perform poorly when applied to unseen image domains. To cope with these limitations, both unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) with full source supervision but without target supervision and semi-supervised learning (SSL) with partial supervision have been proposed. While such methods are effective at aligning different feature distributions, there is still a need to efficiently exploit unlabeled data to address the performance gap with respect to fully-supervised methods. In this paper we address semi-supervised domain adaptation (SSDA) for semantic segmentation, where a large amount of labeled source data as well as a small amount of labeled target data are available. We propose a novel and effective two-step semi-supervised dual-domain adaptation (SSDDA) approach to address both cross- and intra-domain gaps in semantic segmentation. The proposed framework is comprised of two mixing modules. First, we conduct a cross-domain adaptation via an image-level mixing strategy, which learns to align the distribution shift of features between the source data and target data. Second, intra-domain adaptation is achieved using a separate student-teacher network which is built to generate category-level data augmentation by mixing unlabeled target data in a way that respects predicted object boundaries. We demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods on two common synthetic-to-real semantic segmentation benchmarks. An extensive ablation study is provided to further validate the effectiveness of our approach.