# SPCL: A New Framework for Domain Adaptive Semantic Segmentation via Semantic Prototype-based Contrastive Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.12358 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.12358/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 56 of its 84 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Nov 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 56)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Encoder-Decoder with Atrous Separable Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.02611/) (2018)
- [Pyramid Scene Parsing Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01105/) (2016)
- [Unsupervised Domain Adaptation by Backpropagation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.7495/) (2014)
- [Moment Matching for Multi-Source Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01754/) (2018)
- [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)
- [Learning Representations by Maximizing Mutual Information Across Views](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.00910/) (2019)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Dense Contrastive Learning for Self-Supervised Visual Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.09157/) (2020)
- [Confidence Regularized Self-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.09822/) (2019)
- [Contrastive learning of global and local features for medical image segmentation with limited annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.10511/) (2020)
- [Bidirectional Learning for Domain Adaptation of Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.10620/) (2019)
- [Propagate Yourself: Exploring Pixel-Level Consistency for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10043/) (2020)
- [Taking A Closer Look at Domain Shift: Category-level Adversaries for Semantics Consistent Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.09478/) (2018)
- [Prototypical Pseudo Label Denoising and Target Structure Learning for Domain Adaptive Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.10979/) (2021)
- [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)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [PiPa: Pixel- and Patch-wise Self-supervised Learning for Domain Adaptative Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.07609/) (2022)
- [Survey on Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Semantic Segmentation for Visual Perception in Automated Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.11928/) (2023)
- [Exploring High-quality Target Domain Information for Unsupervised Domain Adaptive Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.06100/) (2022)
- [Hard-aware Instance Adaptive Self-training for Unsupervised Cross-domain Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.06992/) (2023)
- [SegDA: Maximum Separable Segment Mask with Pseudo Labels for Domain Adaptive Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.05851/) (2023)
- [PiPa++: Towards Unification of Domain Adaptive Semantic Segmentation via Self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.17101/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Although there is significant progress in supervised semantic segmentation, it remains challenging to deploy the segmentation models to unseen domains due to domain biases. Domain adaptation can help in this regard by transferring knowledge from a labeled source domain to an unlabeled target domain. Previous methods typically attempt to perform the adaptation on global features, however, the local semantic affiliations accounting for each pixel in the feature space are often ignored, resulting in less discriminability. To solve this issue, we propose a novel semantic prototype-based contrastive learning framework for fine-grained class alignment. Specifically, the semantic prototypes provide supervisory signals for per-pixel discriminative representation learning and each pixel of source and target domains in the feature space is required to reflect the content of the corresponding semantic prototype. In this way, our framework is able to explicitly make intra-class pixel representations closer and inter-class pixel representations further apart to improve the robustness of the segmentation model as well as alleviate the domain shift problem. Our method is easy to implement and attains superior results compared to state-of-the-art approaches, as is demonstrated with a number of experiments. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/BinhuiXie/SPCL.