# U-HRNet: Delving into Improving Semantic Representation of High Resolution Network for Dense Prediction

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.07140 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.07140/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 71 of its 87 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Oct 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 71)

- [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)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [Fully Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4038/) (2014)
- [The Cityscapes Dataset for Semantic Urban Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.01685/) (2016)
- [Going Deeper with Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.4842/) (2014)
- [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)
- [Pyramid Scene Parsing Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01105/) (2016)
- [V-Net: Fully Convolutional Neural Networks for Volumetric Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.04797/) (2016)
- [Rethinking Atrous Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.05587/) (2017)
- [TransUNet: Transformers Make Strong Encoders for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.04306/) (2021)
- [UNet++: A Nested U-Net Architecture for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.10165/) (2018)
- [Deep High-Resolution Representation Learning for Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07919/) (2019)
- [Depth Map Prediction from a Single Image using a Multi-Scale Deep Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.2283/) (2014)
- [Dual Attention Network for Scene Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.02983/) (2018)
- [Deep Ordinal Regression Network for Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.02446/) (2018)
- [CCNet: Criss-Cross Attention for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.11721/) (2018)
- [Image Segmentation Using Deep Learning: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.05566/) (2020)
- [BiSeNet: Bilateral Segmentation Network for Real-time Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.00897/) (2018)
- [Segmentation Transformer: Object-Contextual Representations for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.11065/) (2019)
- [Predicting Depth, Surface Normals and Semantic Labels with a Common Multi-Scale Convolutional Architecture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4734/) (2014)
- [RefineNet: Multi-Path Refinement Networks for High-Resolution Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.06612/) (2016)
- [Deeper Depth Prediction with Fully Convolutional Residual Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.00373/) (2016)
- [From Big to Small: Multi-Scale Local Planar Guidance for Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.10326/) (2019)
- [Context Encoding for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.08904/) (2018)
- [Attention Gated Networks: Learning to Leverage Salient Regions in Medical Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.08114/) (2018)
- [Auto-DeepLab: Hierarchical Neural Architecture Search for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.02985/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Real-time High-Resolution Neural Network with Semantic Guidance for Crack Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.00270/) (2023)
- [Charm: The Missing Piece in ViT fine-tuning for Image Aesthetic Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.02522/) (2025)
- [MSBraM: A Multi-scale Self-supervised Brain Foundation Model for Hierarchical EEG Dynamics Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.21402/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

High resolution and advanced semantic representation are both vital for dense prediction. Empirically, low-resolution feature maps often achieve stronger semantic representation, and high-resolution feature maps generally can better identify local features such as edges, but contains weaker semantic information. Existing state-of-the-art frameworks such as HRNet has kept low-resolution and high-resolution feature maps in parallel, and repeatedly exchange the information across different resolutions. However, we believe that the lowest-resolution feature map often contains the strongest semantic information, and it is necessary to go through more layers to merge with high-resolution feature maps, while for high-resolution feature maps, the computational cost of each convolutional layer is very large, and there is no need to go through so many layers. Therefore, we designed a U-shaped High-Resolution Network (U-HRNet), which adds more stages after the feature map with strongest semantic representation and relaxes the constraint in HRNet that all resolutions need to be calculated parallel for a newly added stage. More calculations are allocated to low-resolution feature maps, which significantly improves the overall semantic representation. U-HRNet is a substitute for the HRNet backbone and can achieve significant improvement on multiple semantic segmentation and depth prediction datasets, under the exactly same training and inference setting, with almost no increasing in the amount of calculation. Code is available at PaddleSeg: https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/PaddleSeg.