# MIC: Masked Image Consistency for Context-Enhanced Domain Adaptation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.01322 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.01322/

## Key facts

- Cited by 178 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 92 of its 123 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Dec 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 92)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [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)
- [Domain-Adversarial Training of Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.07818/) (2015)
- [SegFormer: Simple and Efficient Design for Semantic Segmentation with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.15203/) (2021)
- [BEiT: BERT Pre-Training of Image Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.08254/) (2021)
- [FixMatch: Simplifying Semi-Supervised Learning with Consistency and Confidence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.07685/) (2020)
- [Learning Transferable Features with Deep Adaptation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.02791/) (2015)
- [Deep CORAL: Correlation Alignment for Deep Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.01719/) (2016)
- [Deep Hashing Network for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.07522/) (2017)
- [SimMIM: A Simple Framework for Masked Image Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09886/) (2021)
- [CyCADA: Cycle-Consistent Adversarial Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.03213/) (2017)
- [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)
- [Deep Transfer Learning with Joint Adaptation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.06636/) (2016)
- [Learning to Adapt Structured Output Space for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.10349/) (2018)
- [Masked Feature Prediction for Self-Supervised Visual Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.09133/) (2021)
- [Domain Adaptive Faster R-CNN for Object Detection in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.03243/) (2018)
- [Regularization With Stochastic Transformations and Perturbations for Deep Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.04586/) (2016)
- [VisDA: The Visual Domain Adaptation Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.06924/) (2017)
- [Semantic Foggy Scene Understanding with Synthetic Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.07819/) (2017)
- [Return of Frustratingly Easy Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.05547/) (2015)
- [Unsupervised Domain Adaptation with Residual Transfer Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.04433/) (2016)
- [Bidirectional Learning for Domain Adaptation of Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.10620/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 178)

- [Transformer-Based Visual Segmentation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.09854/) (2023)
- [Synthetic Datasets for Autonomous Driving: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.12205/) (2023)
- [SemiVL: Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation with Vision-Language Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16241/) (2023)
- [A Survey of Sim-to-Real Methods in RL: Progress, Prospects and Challenges with Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13187/) (2025)
- [CMDA: Cross-Modality Domain Adaptation for Nighttime Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15942/) (2023)
- [Continual-MAE: Adaptive Distribution Masked Autoencoders for Continual Test-Time Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.12480/) (2023)
- [Unified Language-driven Zero-shot Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.07155/) (2024)
- [Survey on Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Semantic Segmentation for Visual Perception in Automated Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.11928/) (2023)
- [Generalization by Adaptation: Diffusion-Based Domain Extension for Domain-Generalized Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.01850/) (2023)
- [CrossEarth: Geospatial Vision Foundation Model for Domain Generalizable Remote Sensing Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.22629/) (2024)
- [Domain Adaptive and Generalizable Network Architectures and Training Strategies for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.13615/) (2023)
- [MAPSeg: Unified Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Heterogeneous Medical Image Segmentation Based on 3D Masked Autoencoding and Pseudo-Labeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.09373/) (2023)
- [Strong but simple: A Baseline for Domain Generalized Dense Perception by CLIP-based Transfer Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02021/) (2023)
- [Hyperbolic Active Learning for Semantic Segmentation under Domain Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.11180/) (2023)
- [S2R-ViT for Multi-Agent Cooperative Perception: Bridging the Gap from Simulation to Reality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.07935/) (2023)
- [EDAPS: Enhanced Domain-Adaptive Panoptic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.14291/) (2023)
- [Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Semantic Segmentation with Pseudo Label Self-Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.16979/) (2023)
- [Training-Free Model Merging for Multi-target Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.13771/) (2024)
- [Handling Out-of-Distribution Data: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.21160/) (2025)
- [SkyScenes: A Synthetic Dataset for Aerial Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.06719/) (2023)
- [CoDA: Instructive Chain-of-Domain Adaptation with Severity-Aware Visual Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17369/) (2024)
- [Open-Set Domain Adaptation for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.19899/) (2024)
- [MICDrop: Masking Image and Depth Features via Complementary Dropout for Domain-Adaptive Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.16478/) (2024)
- [Unsupervised Video Domain Adaptation with Masked Pre-Training and Collaborative Self-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02914/) (2023)
- [SAM4UDASS: When SAM Meets Unsupervised Domain Adaptive Semantic Segmentation in Intelligent Vehicles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.08604/) (2023)
- [Align and Distill: Unifying and Improving Domain Adaptive Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.12029/) (2024)
- [ASPS: Augmented Segment Anything Model for Polyp Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.00718/) (2024)
- [WeatherEdit: Controllable Weather Editing with 4D Gaussian Field](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.20471/) (2025)
- [Exploring the Benefits of Vision Foundation Models for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09896/) (2024)
- [FPL+: Filtered Pseudo Label-based Unsupervised Cross-Modality Adaptation for 3D Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.04971/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA), a model trained on source data (e.g. synthetic) is adapted to target data (e.g. real-world) without access to target annotation. Most previous UDA methods struggle with classes that have a similar visual appearance on the target domain as no ground truth is available to learn the slight appearance differences. To address this problem, we propose a Masked Image Consistency (MIC) module to enhance UDA by learning spatial context relations of the target domain as additional clues for robust visual recognition. MIC enforces the consistency between predictions of masked target images, where random patches are withheld, and pseudo-labels that are generated based on the complete image by an exponential moving average teacher. To minimize the consistency loss, the network has to learn to infer the predictions of the masked regions from their context. Due to its simple and universal concept, MIC can be integrated into various UDA methods across different visual recognition tasks such as image classification, semantic segmentation, and object detection. MIC significantly improves the state-of-the-art performance across the different recognition tasks for synthetic-to-real, day-to-nighttime, and clear-to-adverse-weather UDA. For instance, MIC achieves an unprecedented UDA performance of 75.9 mIoU and 92.8% on GTA-to-Cityscapes and VisDA-2017, respectively, which corresponds to an improvement of +2.1 and +3.0 percent points over the previous state of the art. The implementation is available at https://github.com/lhoyer/MIC.