# FREDOM: Fairness Domain Adaptation Approach to Semantic Scene Understanding

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.02135 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02135/

## Key facts

- Cited by 27 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 42 of its 54 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Apr 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 42)

- [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)
- [Unsupervised Domain Adaptation by Backpropagation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.7495/) (2014)
- [Learning Transferable Features with Deep Adaptation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.02791/) (2015)
- [Adversarial Discriminative Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.05464/) (2017)
- [Class-Balanced Loss Based on Effective Number of Samples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.05555/) (2019)
- [CyCADA: Cycle-Consistent Adversarial Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.03213/) (2017)
- [Playing for Data: Ground Truth from Computer Games](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.02192/) (2016)
- [Pixel Recurrent Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1601.06759/) (2016)
- [Unpaired Image-to-Image Translation using Cycle-Consistent Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.10593/) (2017)
- [Large-Scale Long-Tailed Recognition in an Open World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05160/) (2019)
- [ADVENT: Adversarial Entropy Minimization for Domain Adaptation in Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.12833/) (2018)
- [Learning to Adapt Structured Output Space for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.10349/) (2018)
- [RefineNet: Multi-Path Refinement Networks for High-Resolution Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.06612/) (2016)
- [Balanced Meta-Softmax for Long-Tailed Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.10740/) (2020)
- [DAFormer: Improving Network Architectures and Training Strategies for Domain-Adaptive Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14887/) (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)
- [DACS: Domain Adaptation via Cross-domain Mixed Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.08702/) (2020)
- [Conditional Random Fields as Recurrent Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03240/) (2015)
- [Unsupervised Intra-domain Adaptation for Semantic Segmentation through Self-Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07703/) (2020)
- [HRDA: Context-Aware High-Resolution Domain-Adaptive Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.13132/) (2022)
- [Domain Adaptation for Structured Output via Discriminative Patch Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.05427/) (2019)
- [Self-supervised Augmentation Consistency for Adapting Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.00097/) (2021)
- [Seesaw Loss for Long-Tailed Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.10032/) (2020)
- [Domain Adaptation for Semantic Segmentation with Maximum Squares Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.13589/) (2019)
- [No More Discrimination: Cross City Adaptation of Road Scene Segmenters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.08509/) (2017)
- [DADA: Depth-aware Domain Adaptation in Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01886/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 27 of 27)

- [Insect-Foundation: A Foundation Model and Large-scale 1M Dataset for Visual Insect Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.15206/) (2023)
- [FairDomain: Achieving Fairness in Cross-Domain Medical Image Segmentation and Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.08813/) (2024)
- [Fairness Continual Learning Approach to Semantic Scene Understanding in Open-World Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15700/) (2023)
- [Cross-view Action Recognition Understanding From Exocentric to Egocentric Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15699/) (2023)
- [Handling Out-of-Distribution Data: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.21160/) (2025)
- [FALCON: Fairness Learning via Contrastive Attention Approach to Continual Semantic Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.15965/) (2023)
- [MICDrop: Masking Image and Depth Features via Complementary Dropout for Domain-Adaptive Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.16478/) (2024)
- [Fairness in Visual Clustering: A Novel Transformer Clustering Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07408/) (2023)
- [Insect-Foundation: A Foundation Model and Large Multimodal Dataset for Vision-Language Insect Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.09906/) (2025)
- [CoPT: Unsupervised Domain Adaptive Segmentation using Domain-Agnostic Text Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.07125/) (2025)
- [Unified Domain Adaptive Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.13254/) (2023)
- [EAGLE: Efficient Adaptive Geometry-based Learning in Cross-view Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.01429/) (2024)
- [When Fairness Meets Privacy: Exploring Privacy Threats in Fair Binary Classifiers via Membership Inference Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.03865/) (2023)
- [SemiDAViL: Semi-supervised Domain Adaptation with Vision-Language Guidance for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.06389/) (2025)
- [DUDA: Distilled Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Lightweight Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.09814/) (2025)
- [varphi-Adapt: A Physics-Informed Adaptation Learning Approach to 2D Quantum Material Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.05184/) (2025)
- [MANGO: Multimodal Attention-based Normalizing Flow Approach to Fusion Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10133/) (2025)
- [Dual-Teacher De-biasing Distillation Framework for Multi-domain Fake News Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.01006/) (2023)
- [Do Fairness Interventions Come at the Cost of Privacy: Evaluations for Binary Classifiers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.06150/) (2025)
- [CLIFF: Continual Learning for Incremental Flake Features in 2D Material Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.17261/) (2025)
- [Balanced Learning for Domain Adaptive Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.06886/) (2025)
- [φ-DPO: Fairness Direct Preference Optimization Approach to Continual Learning in Large Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.22601/) (2026)
- [OpenQlaw: An Agentic AI Assistant for Analysis of 2D Quantum Materials](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.17043/) (2026)
- [Reducing Semantic Ambiguity In Domain Adaptive Semantic Segmentation Via Probabilistic Prototypical Pixel Contrast](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.18543/) (2024)
- [Toward Robust Medical Fairness: Debiased Dual-Modal Alignment via Text-Guided Attribute-Disentangled Prompt Learning for Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.18886/) (2025)
- [Structured prototype regularization for synthetic-to-real driving scene parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.16083/) (2026)
- [α-Graph: Attention-Infused Normalizing Flow Approach to Tractable Graph Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.07961/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Although Domain Adaptation in Semantic Scene Segmentation has shown impressive improvement in recent years, the fairness concerns in the domain adaptation have yet to be well defined and addressed. In addition, fairness is one of the most critical aspects when deploying the segmentation models into human-related real-world applications, e.g., autonomous driving, as any unfair predictions could influence human safety. In this paper, we propose a novel Fairness Domain Adaptation (FREDOM) approach to semantic scene segmentation. In particular, from the proposed formulated fairness objective, a new adaptation framework will be introduced based on the fair treatment of class distributions. Moreover, to generally model the context of structural dependency, a new conditional structural constraint is introduced to impose the consistency of predicted segmentation. Thanks to the proposed Conditional Structure Network, the self-attention mechanism has sufficiently modeled the structural information of segmentation. Through the ablation studies, the proposed method has shown the performance improvement of the segmentation models and promoted fairness in the model predictions. The experimental results on the two standard benchmarks, i.e., SYNTHIA → Cityscapes and GTA5 → Cityscapes, have shown that our method achieved State-of-the-Art (SOTA) performance.