# Learning Context-aware Classifier for Semantic Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.11633 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11633/

## Key facts

- Cited by 23 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 36 of its 44 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Mar 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 36)

- [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)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [Fully Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4038/) (2014)
- [MobileNetV2: Inverted Residuals and Linear Bottlenecks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04381/) (2018)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Learning without Forgetting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.09282/) (2016)
- [Pyramid Scene Parsing Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01105/) (2016)
- [SegNet: A Deep Convolutional Encoder-Decoder Architecture for Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.00561/) (2015)
- [Rethinking Semantic Segmentation from a Sequence-to-Sequence Perspective with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15840/) (2020)
- [Deep High-Resolution Representation Learning for Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09212/) (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)
- [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)
- [CCNet: Criss-Cross Attention for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.11721/) (2018)
- [Segmentation Transformer: Object-Contextual Representations for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.11065/) (2019)
- [Learning Deconvolution Network for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04366/) (2015)
- [Context Encoding for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.08904/) (2018)
- [Prior Guided Feature Enrichment Network for Few-Shot Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.01449/) (2020)
- [Exploring Cross-Image Pixel Contrast for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.11939/) (2021)
- [ParseNet: Looking Wider to See Better](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.04579/) (2015)
- [OCNet: Object Context Network for Scene Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.00916/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 23 of 23)

- [LISA: Reasoning Segmentation via Large Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.00692/) (2023)
- [Spherical Transformer for LiDAR-based 3D Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12766/) (2023)
- [Hierarchical Dense Correlation Distillation for Few-Shot Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14652/) (2023)
- [Explore the Potential of CLIP for Training-Free Open Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.08268/) (2024)
- [OA-CNNs: Omni-Adaptive Sparse CNNs for 3D Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14418/) (2024)
- [See, Say, and Segment: Teaching LMMs to Overcome False Premises](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.08366/) (2023)
- [Unified Language-driven Zero-shot Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.07155/) (2024)
- [CoReS: Orchestrating the Dance of Reasoning and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.05673/) (2024)
- [Rethinking Prior Information Generation with CLIP for Few-Shot Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.08458/) (2024)
- [Boosting Few-shot 3D Point Cloud Segmentation via Query-Guided Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.03177/) (2023)
- [FlashVID: Efficient Video Large Language Models via Training-free Tree-based Spatiotemporal Token Merging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.08024/) (2026)
- [Less Is More, but Where? Dynamic Token Compression via LLM-Guided Keyframe Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.06866/) (2025)
- [Typicalness-Aware Learning for Failure Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.01981/) (2024)
- [DSV-LFS: Unifying LLM-Driven Semantic Cues with Visual Features for Robust Few-Shot Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.04006/) (2025)
- [Dynamic-dLLM: Dynamic Cache-Budget and Adaptive Parallel Decoding for Training-Free Acceleration of Diffusion LLM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.26120/) (2026)
- [SSA-Seg: Semantic and Spatial Adaptive Pixel-level Classifier for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.06525/) (2024)
- [CitySeg: A 3D Open Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation Foundation Model in City-scale Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.09470/) (2025)
- [Hierarchical Dense Correlation Distillation for Few-Shot Segmentation-Extended Abstract](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.15278/) (2023)
- [Symmetrical Joint Learning Support-query Prototypes for Few-shot Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.19306/) (2024)
- [Classifier Enhancement Using Extended Context and Domain Experts for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.25174/) (2025)
- [Beyond Binary Contrast: Modeling Continuous Skeleton Action Spaces with Transitional Anchors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.17914/) (2026)
- [DC-Leap: Training-Free Acceleration of dLLMs via Draft-Guided Contiguous Leaping Decoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.20467/) (2026)
- [B-Spline Embedded Structure Learning for 3D Tooth Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.17291/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Semantic segmentation is still a challenging task for parsing diverse contexts in different scenes, thus the fixed classifier might not be able to well address varying feature distributions during testing. Different from the mainstream literature where the efficacy of strong backbones and effective decoder heads has been well studied, in this paper, additional contextual hints are instead exploited via learning a context-aware classifier whose content is data-conditioned, decently adapting to different latent distributions. Since only the classifier is dynamically altered, our method is model-agnostic and can be easily applied to generic segmentation models. Notably, with only negligible additional parameters and +2% inference time, decent performance gain has been achieved on both small and large models with challenging benchmarks, manifesting substantial practical merits brought by our simple yet effective method. The implementation is available at urlhttps://github.com/tianzhuotao/CAC.