# Domain-invariant Prototypes for Semantic Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2208.06087 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.06087/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 53 of its 88 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Aug 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 53)

- [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)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03167/) (2015)
- [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)
- [Prototypical Networks for Few-shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.05175/) (2017)
- [Pyramid Scene Parsing Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01105/) (2016)
- [BDD100K: A Diverse Driving Dataset for Heterogeneous Multitask Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.04687/) (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)
- [Maximum Classifier Discrepancy for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.02560/) (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)
- [PANet: Few-Shot Image Semantic Segmentation with Prototype Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.06391/) (2019)
- [Confidence Regularized Self-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.09822/) (2019)
- [One-Shot Learning for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.03410/) (2017)
- [Bidirectional Learning for Domain Adaptation of Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.10620/) (2019)
- [Prior Guided Feature Enrichment Network for Few-Shot Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.01449/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Rectifying Pseudo Label Learning via Uncertainty Estimation for Domain Adaptive Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.03773/) (2020)
- [RobustNet: Improving Domain Generalization in Urban-Scene Segmentation via Instance Selective Whitening](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15597/) (2021)
- [Adaptive Prototype Learning and Allocation for Few-Shot Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.01893/) (2021)
- [Image to Image Translation for Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.00479/) (2017)
- [Domain Adaptation for Structured Output via Discriminative Patch Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.05427/) (2019)

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

- [Deep learning based infrared small object segmentation: Challenges and future directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.14168/) (2025)
- [TC-ADA: One-Shot Active Domain Adaptation for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.33432/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Deep Learning has greatly advanced the performance of semantic segmentation, however, its success relies on the availability of large amounts of annotated data for training. Hence, many efforts have been devoted to domain adaptive semantic segmentation that focuses on transferring semantic knowledge from a labeled source domain to an unlabeled target domain. Existing self-training methods typically require multiple rounds of training, while another popular framework based on adversarial training is known to be sensitive to hyper-parameters. In this paper, we present an easy-to-train framework that learns domain-invariant prototypes for domain adaptive semantic segmentation. In particular, we show that domain adaptation shares a common character with few-shot learning in that both aim to recognize some types of unseen data with knowledge learned from large amounts of seen data. Thus, we propose a unified framework for domain adaptation and few-shot learning. The core idea is to use the class prototypes extracted from few-shot annotated target images to classify pixels of both source images and target images. Our method involves only one-stage training and does not need to be trained on large-scale un-annotated target images. Moreover, our method can be extended to variants of both domain adaptation and few-shot learning. Experiments on adapting GTA5-to-Cityscapes and SYNTHIA-to-Cityscapes show that our method achieves competitive performance to state-of-the-art.