# Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Segmentation with Black-box Source Model

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2208.07769 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.07769/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 19 of its 29 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Aug 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Do We Really Need to Access the Source Data? Source Hypothesis Transfer for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.08546/) (2020)
- [Dreaming to Distill: Data-free Knowledge Transfer via DeepInversion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.08795/) (2019)
- [Confidence Regularized Self-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.09822/) (2019)
- [Tent: Fully Test-time Adaptation by Entropy Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.10726/) (2020)
- [Source-Relaxed Domain Adaptation for Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.03697/) (2020)
- [Adversarial Unsupervised Domain Adaptation with Conditional and Label Shift: Infer, Align and Iterate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.13469/) (2021)
- [Adapting Off-the-Shelf Source Segmenter for Target Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.12497/) (2021)
- [Unsupervised Domain Adaptation of Black-Box Source Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.02839/) (2021)
- [Importance-Aware Semantic Segmentation in Self-Driving with Discrete Wasserstein Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.12440/) (2020)
- [A Unified Conditional Disentanglement Framework for Multimodal Brain MR Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.05434/) (2021)
- [Generative Self-training for Cross-domain Unsupervised Tagged-to-Cine MRI Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.12499/) (2021)
- [Subtype-aware Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Medical Diagnosis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00318/) (2021)
- [Domain Generalization under Conditional and Label Shifts via Variational Bayesian Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.10931/) (2021)
- [Energy-constrained Self-training for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00316/) (2021)
- [Dual-cycle Constrained Bijective VAE-GAN For Tagged-to-Cine Magnetic Resonance Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.05439/) (2021)
- [Recursively Conditional Gaussian for Ordinal Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.13467/) (2021)
- [Segmentation of Cardiac Structures via Successive Subspace Learning with Saab Transform from Cine MRI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.10718/) (2021)
- [Reinforced Wasserstein Training for Severity-Aware Semantic Segmentation in Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.04751/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [Source-Free Unsupervised Domain Adaptation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.00265/) (2022)
- [Memory Consistent Unsupervised Off-the-Shelf Model Adaptation for Source-Relaxed Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.07910/) (2022)
- [MAPS: A Noise-Robust Progressive Learning Approach for Source-Free Domain Adaptive Keypoint Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04589/) (2023)
- [Light-weight Fine-tuning Method for Defending Adversarial Noise in Pre-trained Medical Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.02716/) (2024)
- [Cross-Domain Transfer Learning with CoRTe: Consistent and Reliable Transfer from Black-Box to Lightweight Segmentation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.13122/) (2024)
- [SRPL-SFDA: SAM-Guided Reliable Pseudo-Labels for Source-Free Domain Adaptation in Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.09403/) (2025)
- [Robust Source-Free Domain Adaptation for Medical Image Segmentation based on Curriculum Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.08393/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) has been widely used to transfer knowledge from a labeled source domain to an unlabeled target domain to counter the difficulty of labeling in a new domain. The training of conventional solutions usually relies on the existence of both source and target domain data. However, privacy of the large-scale and well-labeled data in the source domain and trained model parameters can become the major concern of cross center/domain collaborations. In this work, to address this, we propose a practical solution to UDA for segmentation with a black-box segmentation model trained in the source domain only, rather than original source data or a white-box source model. Specifically, we resort to a knowledge distillation scheme with exponential mixup decay (EMD) to gradually learn target-specific representations. In addition, unsupervised entropy minimization is further applied to regularization of the target domain confidence. We evaluated our framework on the BraTS 2018 database, achieving performance on par with white-box source model adaptation approaches.