# High-level Feature Guided Decoding for Semantic Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.08646 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08646/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 60 of its 81 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Mar 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 60)

- [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)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [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)
- [A ConvNet for the 2020s](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03545/) (2022)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Masked-attention Mask Transformer for Universal Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01527/) (2021)
- [Non-local Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07971/) (2017)
- [Rethinking Atrous Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.05587/) (2017)
- [Vision Transformers for Dense Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13413/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Unified Perceptual Parsing for Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.10221/) (2018)
- [Multi-Scale Context Aggregation by Dilated Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.07122/) (2015)
- [Dual Attention Network for Scene Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.02983/) (2018)
- [COCO-Stuff: Thing and Stuff Classes in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03716/) (2016)
- [Segmenter: Transformer for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05633/) (2021)
- [Panoptic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.00868/) (2018)
- [CCNet: Criss-Cross Attention for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.11721/) (2018)
- [Panoptic Feature Pyramid Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.02446/) (2019)
- [Simple Copy-Paste is a Strong Data Augmentation Method for Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.07177/) (2020)

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

- [Self-Guided Action Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.12189/) (2025)
- [Panoramic Out-of-Distribution Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.03539/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Existing pyramid-based upsamplers (e.g. SemanticFPN), although efficient, usually produce less accurate results compared to dilation-based models when using the same backbone. This is partially caused by the contaminated high-level features since they are fused and fine-tuned with noisy low-level features on limited data. To address this issue, we propose to use powerful pre-trained high-level features as guidance (HFG) so that the upsampler can produce robust results. Specifically, only the high-level features from the backbone are used to train the class tokens, which are then reused by the upsampler for classification, guiding the upsampler features to more discriminative backbone features. One crucial design of the HFG is to protect the high-level features from being contaminated by using proper stop-gradient operations so that the backbone does not update according to the noisy gradient from the upsampler. To push the upper limit of HFG, we introduce a context augmentation encoder (CAE) that can efficiently and effectively operate on the low-resolution high-level feature, resulting in improved representation and thus better guidance. We named our complete solution as the High-Level Features Guided Decoder (HFGD). We evaluate the proposed HFGD on three benchmarks: Pascal Context, COCOStuff164k, and Cityscapes. HFGD achieves state-of-the-art results among methods that do not use extra training data, demonstrating its effectiveness and generalization ability.