# SSA: Semantic Structure Aware Inference for Weakly Pixel-Wise Dense Predictions without Cost

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.03392 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.03392/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 35 of its 44 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Nov 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 35)

- [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)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [Grad-CAM: Visual Explanations from Deep Networks via Gradient-based Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02391/) (2016)
- [Rethinking the Inception Architecture for Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.00567/) (2015)
- [Fully Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4038/) (2014)
- [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)
- [Learning Deep Features for Discriminative Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.04150/) (2015)
- [Improved Regularization of Convolutional Neural Networks with Cutout](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.04552/) (2017)
- [Random Erasing Data Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.04896/) (2017)
- [Grad-CAM++: Improved Visual Explanations for Deep Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.11063/) (2017)
- [Self-supervised Equivariant Attention Mechanism for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04581/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Causal Intervention for Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.12547/) (2020)
- [Simple Does It: Weakly Supervised Instance and Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.07485/) (2016)
- [Object Region Mining with Adversarial Erasing: A Simple Classification to Semantic Segmentation Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.08448/) (2017)
- [Seed, Expand and Constrain: Three Principles for Weakly-Supervised Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.06098/) (2016)
- [Adversarial Complementary Learning for Weakly Supervised Object Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.06962/) (2018)
- [FickleNet: Weakly and Semi-supervised Semantic Image Segmentation using Stochastic Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.10421/) (2019)
- [Axiom-based Grad-CAM: Towards Accurate Visualization and Explanation of CNNs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.02312/) (2020)
- [Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation via Sub-category Exploration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.01183/) (2020)
- [Mining Cross-Image Semantics for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.01947/) (2020)
- [Attention-based Dropout Layer for Weakly Supervised Object Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10028/) (2019)
- [Smooth Grad-CAM++: An Enhanced Inference Level Visualization Technique for Deep Convolutional Neural Network Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.01224/) (2019)
- [CIAN: Cross-Image Affinity Net for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.10842/) (2018)
- [Self-produced Guidance for Weakly-supervised Object Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.08902/) (2018)
- [Self-Supervised Difference Detection for Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.01370/) (2019)

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

- [VRP-SAM: SAM with Visual Reference Prompt](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17726/) (2024)
- [Prediction Calibration for Generalized Few-shot Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08290/) (2022)
- [FOCUS: Fused Observation of Channels for Unveiling Spectra](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.14787/) (2025)
- [PRSeg: A Lightweight Patch Rotate MLP Decoder for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.00671/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The pixel-wise dense prediction tasks based on weakly supervisions currently use Class Attention Maps (CAM) to generate pseudo masks as ground-truth. However, the existing methods typically depend on the painstaking training modules, which may bring in grinding computational overhead and complex training procedures. In this work, the semantic structure aware inference (SSA) is proposed to explore the semantic structure information hidden in different stages of the CNN-based network to generate high-quality CAM in the model inference. Specifically, the semantic structure modeling module (SSM) is first proposed to generate the class-agnostic semantic correlation representation, where each item denotes the affinity degree between one category of objects and all the others. Then the structured feature representation is explored to polish an immature CAM via the dot product operation. Finally, the polished CAMs from different backbone stages are fused as the output. The proposed method has the advantage of no parameters and does not need to be trained. Therefore, it can be applied to a wide range of weakly-supervised pixel-wise dense prediction tasks. Experimental results on both weakly-supervised object localization and weakly-supervised semantic segmentation tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, which achieves the new state-of-the-art results on these two tasks.