# Distribution Regularized Self-Supervised Learning for Domain Adaptation of Semantic Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.09683 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.09683/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 43 of its 49 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Jun 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 43)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (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)
- [Adversarial Discriminative Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.05464/) (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)
- [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 Adaptive Faster R-CNN for Object Detection in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.03243/) (2018)
- [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)
- [Taking A Closer Look at Domain Shift: Category-level Adversaries for Semantics Consistent Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.09478/) (2018)
- [Unsupervised Intra-domain Adaptation for Semantic Segmentation through Self-Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07703/) (2020)
- [Wider or Deeper: Revisiting the ResNet Model for Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.10080/) (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)
- [Domain Adaptation for Structured Output via Discriminative Patch Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.05427/) (2019)
- [Progressive Domain Adaptation for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.11319/) (2019)
- [Differential Treatment for Stuff and Things: A Simple Unsupervised Domain Adaptation Method for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.08040/) (2020)
- [No More Discrimination: Cross City Adaptation of Road Scene Segmenters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.08509/) (2017)
- [A Robust Learning Approach to Domain Adaptive Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.02361/) (2019)
- [All about Structure: Adapting Structural Information across Domains for Boosting Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.12212/) (2019)
- [Constructing Self-motivated Pyramid Curriculums for Cross-Domain Semantic Segmentation: A Non-Adversarial Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.09547/) (2019)
- [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)
- [HoMM: Higher-order Moment Matching for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.11976/) (2019)
- [Cluster Alignment with a Teacher for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.09980/) (2019)
- [RepMet: Representative-based metric learning for classification and one-shot object detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.04728/) (2018)
- [Fully Convolutional Adaptation Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.08286/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Leveraging Topology for Domain Adaptive Road Segmentation in Satellite and Aerial Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.15625/) (2023)
- [Context Aware Grounded Teacher for Source Free Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.15404/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper proposes a novel pixel-level distribution regularization scheme (DRSL) for self-supervised domain adaptation of semantic segmentation. In a typical setting, the classification loss forces the semantic segmentation model to greedily learn the representations that capture inter-class variations in order to determine the decision (class) boundary. Due to the domain shift, this decision boundary is unaligned in the target domain, resulting in noisy pseudo labels adversely affecting self-supervised domain adaptation. To overcome this limitation, along with capturing inter-class variation, we capture pixel-level intra-class variations through class-aware multi-modal distribution learning (MMDL). Thus, the information necessary for capturing the intra-class variations is explicitly disentangled from the information necessary for inter-class discrimination. Features captured thus are much more informative, resulting in pseudo-labels with low noise. This disentanglement allows us to perform separate alignments in discriminative space and multi-modal distribution space, using cross-entropy based self-learning for the former. For later, we propose a novel stochastic mode alignment method, by explicitly decreasing the distance between the target and source pixels that map to the same mode. The distance metric learning loss, computed over pseudo-labels and backpropagated from multi-modal modeling head, acts as the regularizer over the base network shared with the segmentation head. The results from comprehensive experiments on synthetic to real domain adaptation setups, i.e., GTA-V/SYNTHIA to Cityscapes, show that DRSL outperforms many existing approaches (a minimum margin of 2.3% and 2.5% in mIoU for SYNTHIA to Cityscapes).