# WildNet: Learning Domain Generalized Semantic Segmentation from the Wild

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.01446 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.01446/

## Key facts

- Cited by 76 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 58 of its 67 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Apr 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 58)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [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)
- [Deformable DETR: Deformable Transformers for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04159/) (2020)
- [Encoder-Decoder with Atrous Separable Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.02611/) (2018)
- [Supervised Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.11362/) (2020)
- [Arbitrary Style Transfer in Real-time with Adaptive Instance Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06868/) (2017)
- [Unsupervised Feature Learning via Non-Parametric Instance-level Discrimination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.01978/) (2018)
- [BDD100K: A Diverse Driving Dataset for Heterogeneous Multitask Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.04687/) (2018)
- [Deep CORAL: Correlation Alignment for Deep Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.01719/) (2016)
- [ShuffleNet V2: Practical Guidelines for Efficient CNN Architecture Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.11164/) (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)
- [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)
- [Domain Generalization with MixStyle](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02008/) (2021)
- [FDA: Fourier Domain Adaptation for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05498/) (2020)
- [Two at Once: Enhancing Learning and Generalization Capacities via IBN-Net](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.09441/) (2018)
- [Panoptic-DeepLab](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.04751/) (2019)
- [Universal Style Transfer via Feature Transforms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.08086/) (2017)
- [With a Little Help from My Friends: Nearest-Neighbor Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14548/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Domain Randomization and Pyramid Consistency: Simulation-to-Real Generalization without Accessing Target Domain Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.00889/) (2019)
- [FCNs in the Wild: Pixel-level Adversarial and Constraint-based Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.02649/) (2016)
- [RobustNet: Improving Domain Generalization in Urban-Scene Segmentation via Instance Selective Whitening](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15597/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 76)

- [TTN: A Domain-Shift Aware Batch Normalization in Test-Time Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05155/) (2023)
- [Stronger, Fewer, & Superior: Harnessing Vision Foundation Models for Domain Generalized Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.04265/) (2023)
- [PASTA: Proportional Amplitude Spectrum Training Augmentation for Syn-to-Real Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.00979/) (2022)
- [Towards Open-Set Test-Time Adaptation Utilizing the Wisdom of Crowds in Entropy Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.06879/) (2023)
- [Learning Content-enhanced Mask Transformer for Domain Generalized Urban-Scene Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.00371/) (2023)
- [Survey on Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Semantic Segmentation for Visual Perception in Automated Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.11928/) (2023)
- [A Simple Recipe for Language-guided Domain Generalized Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17922/) (2023)
- [Generalization by Adaptation: Diffusion-Based Domain Extension for Domain-Generalized Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.01850/) (2023)
- [Semantic Image Segmentation: Two Decades of Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.06378/) (2023)
- [Texture Learning Domain Randomization for Domain Generalized Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11546/) (2023)
- [SoMA: Singular Value Decomposed Minor Components Adaptation for Domain Generalizable Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.04077/) (2024)
- [Mamba as a Bridge: Where Vision Foundation Models Meet Vision Language Models for Domain-Generalized Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.03193/) (2025)
- [Rethinking Multi-domain Generalization with A General Learning Objective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.18853/) (2024)
- [Style-Hallucinated Dual Consistency Learning: A Unified Framework for Visual Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09068/) (2022)
- [Learning Spectral-Decomposed Tokens for Domain Generalized Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.18568/) (2024)
- [Textual Query-Driven Mask Transformer for Domain Generalized Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.09033/) (2024)
- [Domain Generalization via Balancing Training Difficulty and Model Capability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.00844/) (2023)
- [Strong but simple: A Baseline for Domain Generalized Dense Perception by CLIP-based Transfer Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02021/) (2023)
- [Style Blind Domain Generalized Semantic Segmentation via Covariance Alignment and Semantic Consistence Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.06122/) (2024)
- [Intra-Source Style Augmentation for Improved Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.10175/) (2022)
- [FisherTune: Fisher-Guided Robust Tuning of Vision Foundation Models for Domain Generalized Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.17940/) (2025)
- [Generalized Semantic Segmentation by Self-Supervised Source Domain Projection and Multi-Level Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.01906/) (2023)
- [MRFP: Learning Generalizable Semantic Segmentation from Sim-2-Real with Multi-Resolution Feature Perturbation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.18331/) (2023)
- [Augmentation-based Domain Generalization for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.12122/) (2023)
- [Style Interleaved Learning for Generalizable Person Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.03132/) (2022)
- [Semantic Self-adaptation: Enhancing Generalization with a Single Sample](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.05788/) (2022)
- [Intra- & Extra-Source Exemplar-Based Style Synthesis for Improved Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.00648/) (2023)
- [A Re-Parameterized Vision Transformer (ReVT) for Domain-Generalized Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.13331/) (2023)
- [Exploring Semantic Consistency and Style Diversity for Domain Generalized Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.12050/) (2024)
- [Learning Fine-grained Domain Generalization via Hyperbolic State Space Hallucination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.08020/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present a new domain generalized semantic segmentation network named WildNet, which learns domain-generalized features by leveraging a variety of contents and styles from the wild. In domain generalization, the low generalization ability for unseen target domains is clearly due to overfitting to the source domain. To address this problem, previous works have focused on generalizing the domain by removing or diversifying the styles of the source domain. These alleviated overfitting to the source-style but overlooked overfitting to the source-content. In this paper, we propose to diversify both the content and style of the source domain with the help of the wild. Our main idea is for networks to naturally learn domain-generalized semantic information from the wild. To this end, we diversify styles by augmenting source features to resemble wild styles and enable networks to adapt to a variety of styles. Furthermore, we encourage networks to learn class-discriminant features by providing semantic variations borrowed from the wild to source contents in the feature space. Finally, we regularize networks to capture consistent semantic information even when both the content and style of the source domain are extended to the wild. Extensive experiments on five different datasets validate the effectiveness of our WildNet, and we significantly outperform state-of-the-art methods. The source code and model are available online: https://github.com/suhyeonlee/WildNet.
