# GMMSeg: Gaussian Mixture based Generative Semantic Segmentation Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.02025 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02025/

## Key facts

- Cited by 87 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 95 of its 142 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Oct 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 95)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [On Calibration of Modern Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.04599/) (2017)
- [Fully Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4038/) (2014)
- [Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01507/) (2017)
- [The Cityscapes Dataset for Semantic Urban Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.01685/) (2016)
- [Simple and Scalable Predictive Uncertainty Estimation using Deep Ensembles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01474/) (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)
- [Improved Techniques for Training GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.03498/) (2016)
- [SegFormer: Simple and Efficient Design for Semantic Segmentation with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.15203/) (2021)
- [Pyramid Scene Parsing Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01105/) (2016)
- [A Baseline for Detecting Misclassified and Out-of-Distribution Examples in Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02136/) (2016)
- [What Uncertainties Do We Need in Bayesian Deep Learning for Computer Vision?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.04977/) (2017)
- [Masked-attention Mask Transformer for Universal Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01527/) (2021)
- [Sinkhorn Distances: Lightspeed Computation of Optimal Transportation Distances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1306.0895/) (2013)
- [Non-local Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07971/) (2017)
- [Deformable Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06211/) (2017)
- [SegNet: A Deep Convolutional Encoder-Decoder Architecture for Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.00561/) (2015)
- [A Simple Unified Framework for Detecting Out-of-Distribution Samples and Adversarial Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03888/) (2018)
- [Deep High-Resolution Representation Learning for Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07919/) (2019)
- [Rethinking Semantic Segmentation from a Sequence-to-Sequence Perspective with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15840/) (2020)
- [Enhancing The Reliability of Out-of-distribution Image Detection in Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02690/) (2017)
- [Energy-based Out-of-distribution Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.03759/) (2020)
- [Can You Trust Your Model's Uncertainty? Evaluating Predictive Uncertainty Under Dataset Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02530/) (2019)
- [Unified Perceptual Parsing for Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.10221/) (2018)
- [Per-Pixel Classification is Not All You Need for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.06278/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 87)

- [RbA: Segmenting Unknown Regions Rejected by All](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.14293/) (2022)
- [MomentDiff: Generative Video Moment Retrieval from Random to Real](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.02869/) (2023)
- [Residual Pattern Learning for Pixel-wise Out-of-Distribution Detection in Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.14512/) (2022)
- [CATR: Combinatorial-Dependence Audio-Queried Transformer for Audio-Visual Video Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.09709/) (2023)
- [DiffusionRet: Generative Text-Video Retrieval with Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.09867/) (2023)
- [On Advantages of Mask-level Recognition for Outlier-aware Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.03407/) (2023)
- [Towards Data-and Knowledge-Driven Artificial Intelligence: A Survey on Neuro-Symbolic Computing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.15889/) (2022)
- [Maskomaly:Zero-Shot Mask Anomaly Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16972/) (2023)
- [Outlier detection by ensembling uncertainty with negative objectness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.15374/) (2024)
- [Generative Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11316/) (2023)
- [CLUSTSEG: Clustering for Universal Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.02187/) (2023)
- [Logic-induced Diagnostic Reasoning for Semi-supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12595/) (2023)
- [Clustering based Point Cloud Representation Learning for 3D Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.14605/) (2023)
- [LOGICSEG: Parsing Visual Semantics with Neural Logic Learning and Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.13556/) (2023)
- [Visual Knowledge in the Big Model Era: Retrospect and Prospect](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.04308/) (2024)
- [Far Away in the Deep Space: Dense Nearest-Neighbor-Based Out-of-Distribution Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.06660/) (2022)
- [UGainS: Uncertainty Guided Anomaly Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.02046/) (2023)
- [Learning Clustering-based Prototypes for Compositional Zero-shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.06501/) (2025)
- [HiDiff: Hybrid Diffusion Framework for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.03548/) (2024)
- [Out-of-Distribution Segmentation in Autonomous Driving: Problems and State of the Art](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.08695/) (2025)
- [Open-Vocabulary Segmentation with Unpaired Mask-Text Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.08960/) (2024)
- [Placing Objects in Context via Inpainting for Out-of-distribution Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.16392/) (2024)
- [Clustering Propagation for Universal Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.16646/) (2024)
- [Neural Clustering based Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17409/) (2024)
- [A Likelihood Ratio-Based Approach to Segmenting Unknown Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.06424/) (2024)
- [Mixture of Gaussian-distributed Prototypes with Generative Modelling for Interpretable and Trustworthy Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00092/) (2023)
- [CPM: Class-conditional Prompting Machine for Audio-visual Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.05358/) (2024)
- [Spotting the Unexpected (STU): A 3D LiDAR Dataset for Anomaly Segmentation in Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.02148/) (2025)
- [Transferring to Real-World Layouts: A Depth-aware Framework for Scene Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12682/) (2023)
- [Diffusion for Out-of-Distribution Detection on Road Scenes and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.15739/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Prevalent semantic segmentation solutions are, in essence, a dense discriminative classifier of p(class|pixel feature). Though straightforward, this de facto paradigm neglects the underlying data distribution p(pixel feature|class), and struggles to identify out-of-distribution data. Going beyond this, we propose GMMSeg, a new family of segmentation models that rely on a dense generative classifier for the joint distribution p(pixel feature,class). For each class, GMMSeg builds Gaussian Mixture Models (GMMs) via Expectation-Maximization (EM), so as to capture class-conditional densities. Meanwhile, the deep dense representation is end-to-end trained in a discriminative manner, i.e., maximizing p(class|pixel feature). This endows GMMSeg with the strengths of both generative and discriminative models. With a variety of segmentation architectures and backbones, GMMSeg outperforms the discriminative counterparts on three closed-set datasets. More impressively, without any modification, GMMSeg even performs well on open-world datasets. We believe this work brings fundamental insights into the related fields.