# Exploiting Inter-pixel Correlations in Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Semantic Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.10916 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.10916/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 42 of its 45 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Oct 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 42)

- [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)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [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)
- [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)
- [CBAM: Convolutional Block Attention Module](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.06521/) (2018)
- [Learning Deep Features for Discriminative Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.04150/) (2015)
- [Non-local Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07971/) (2017)
- [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)
- [Unpaired Image-to-Image Translation using Cycle-Consistent Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.10593/) (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)
- [Bidirectional Learning for Domain Adaptation of Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.10620/) (2019)
- [Self-supervised Equivariant Attention Mechanism for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04581/) (2020)
- [Prototypical Pseudo Label Denoising and Target Structure Learning for Domain Adaptive Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.10979/) (2021)
- [Rectifying Pseudo Label Learning via Uncertainty Estimation for Domain Adaptive Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.03773/) (2020)
- [A Decomposable Attention Model for Natural Language Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.01933/) (2016)
- [Unsupervised Intra-domain Adaptation for Semantic Segmentation through Self-Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07703/) (2020)
- [Long Short-Term Memory-Networks for Machine Reading](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1601.06733/) (2016)
- [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)
- [Classes Matter: A Fine-grained Adversarial Approach to Cross-domain Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.09222/) (2020)
- [Differential Treatment for Stuff and Things: A Simple Unsupervised Domain Adaptation Method for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.08040/) (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)
- [Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for One-stage Object Detector using Offsets to Bounding Box](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.09656/) (2022)
- [Unsupervised Domain Adaptive Lane Detection via Contextual Contrast and Aggregation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.13328/) (2024)
- [Structured prototype regularization for synthetic-to-real driving scene parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.16083/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

"Self-training" has become a dominant method for semantic segmentation via unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA). It creates a set of pseudo labels for the target domain to give explicit supervision. However, the pseudo labels are noisy, sparse and do not provide any information about inter-pixel correlations. We regard inter-pixel correlation quite important because semantic segmentation is a task of predicting highly structured pixel-level outputs. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a method of transferring the inter-pixel correlations from the source domain to the target domain via a self-attention module. The module takes the prediction of the segmentation network as an input and creates a self-attended prediction that correlates similar pixels. The module is trained only on the source domain to learn the domain-invariant inter-pixel correlations, then later, it is used to train the segmentation network on the target domain. The network learns not only from the pseudo labels but also by following the output of the self-attention module which provides additional knowledge about the inter-pixel correlations. Through extensive experiments, we show that our method significantly improves the performance on two standard UDA benchmarks and also can be combined with recent state-of-the-art method to achieve better performance.