# Distribution Aligned Diffusion and Prototype-guided network for Unsupervised Domain Adaptive Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.12313 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12313/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Medical imaging and segmentation, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 25 of its 29 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Mar 2023.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [Medical imaging and segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/medical-imaging-and-segmentation/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 25 of 25)

- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05233/) (2021)
- [Dropout as a Bayesian Approximation: Representing Model Uncertainty in Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02142/) (2015)
- [Encoder-Decoder with Atrous Separable Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.02611/) (2018)
- [Unsupervised Domain Adaptation by Backpropagation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.7495/) (2014)
- [Label-Efficient Semantic Segmentation with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.03126/) (2021)
- [DiffusionDet: Diffusion Model for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09788/) (2022)
- [SegDiff: Image Segmentation with Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.00390/) (2021)
- [Prototypical Pseudo Label Denoising and Target Structure Learning for Domain Adaptive Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.10979/) (2021)
- [FCNs in the Wild: Pixel-level Adversarial and Constraint-based Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.02649/) (2016)
- [REFUGE Challenge: A Unified Framework for Evaluating Automated Methods for Glaucoma Assessment from Fundus Photographs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.03667/) (2019)
- [Rectifying Pseudo Label Learning via Uncertainty Estimation for Domain Adaptive Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.03773/) (2020)
- [Every Pixel Matters: Center-aware Feature Alignment for Domain Adaptive Object Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.08574/) (2020)
- [Repurposing GANs for One-shot Semantic Part Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.04379/) (2021)
- [Generative Hierarchical Features from Synthesizing Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.10379/) (2020)
- [TVT: Transferable Vision Transformer for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05988/) (2021)
- [StainGAN: Stain Style Transfer for Digital Histological Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.01601/) (2018)
- [Source-Free Domain Adaptive Fundus Image Segmentation with Denoised Pseudo-Labeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.09735/) (2021)
- [Safe Self-Refinement for Transformer-based Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.07683/) (2022)
- [Source-Relaxed Domain Adaptation for Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.03697/) (2020)
- [Task Driven Generative Modeling for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation: Application to X-ray Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.07201/) (2018)
- [Boundary and Entropy-driven Adversarial Learning for Fundus Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.11143/) (2019)
- [Patch-based Output Space Adversarial Learning for Joint Optic Disc and Cup Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.07519/) (2019)
- [Unsupervised Domain Adaptive Salient Object Detection Through Uncertainty-Aware Pseudo-Label Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.13170/) (2022)
- [Unsupervised Domain Adaptive Fundus Image Segmentation with Category-level Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.03684/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The Diffusion Probabilistic Model (DPM) has emerged as a highly effective generative model in the field of computer vision. Its intermediate latent vectors offer rich semantic information, making it an attractive option for various downstream tasks such as segmentation and detection. In order to explore its potential further, we have taken a step forward and considered a more complex scenario in the medical image domain, specifically, under an unsupervised adaptation condition. To this end, we propose a Diffusion-based and Prototype-guided network (DP-Net) for unsupervised domain adaptive segmentation. Concretely, our DP-Net consists of two stages: 1) Distribution Aligned Diffusion (DADiff), which involves training a domain discriminator to minimize the difference between the intermediate features generated by the DPM, thereby aligning the inter-domain distribution; and 2) Prototype-guided Consistency Learning (PCL), which utilizes feature centroids as prototypes and applies a prototype-guided loss to ensure that the segmentor learns consistent content from both source and target domains. Our approach is evaluated on fundus datasets through a series of experiments, which demonstrate that the performance of the proposed method is reliable and outperforms state-of-the-art methods. Our work presents a promising direction for using DPM in complex medical image scenarios, opening up new possibilities for further research in medical imaging.