# High-fidelity Pseudo-labels for Boosting Weakly-Supervised Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.02621 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02621/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 39 of its 64 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Apr 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 39)

- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [The Cityscapes Dataset for Semantic Urban Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.01685/) (2016)
- [Learning Deep Features for Discriminative Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.04150/) (2015)
- [Image Segmentation Using Deep Learning: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.05566/) (2020)
- [Long-tail learning via logit adjustment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.07314/) (2020)
- [ScribbleSup: Scribble-Supervised Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.05144/) (2016)
- [Learning Pixel-level Semantic Affinity with Image-level Supervision for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.10464/) (2018)
- [Self-supervised Equivariant Attention Mechanism for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04581/) (2020)
- [What's the Point: Semantic Segmentation with Point Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02106/) (2015)
- [Weakly Supervised Learning of Instance Segmentation with Inter-pixel Relations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05044/) (2019)
- [BoxSup: Exploiting Bounding Boxes to Supervise Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.01640/) (2015)
- [Causal Intervention for Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.12547/) (2020)
- [Simple Does It: Weakly Supervised Instance and Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.07485/) (2016)
- [Object Region Mining with Adversarial Erasing: A Simple Classification to Semantic Segmentation Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.08448/) (2017)
- [Seed, Expand and Constrain: Three Principles for Weakly-Supervised Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.06098/) (2016)
- [Weakly- and Semi-Supervised Learning of a DCNN for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.02734/) (2015)
- [Tell Me Where to Look: Guided Attention Inference Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.10171/) (2018)
- [Single-Stage Semantic Segmentation from Image Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.08104/) (2020)
- [FickleNet: Weakly and Semi-supervised Semantic Image Segmentation using Stochastic Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.10421/) (2019)
- [Revisiting Dilated Convolution: A Simple Approach for Weakly- and Semi- Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.04574/) (2018)
- [Mining Cross-Image Semantics for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.01947/) (2020)
- [Multi-class Token Transformer for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02891/) (2022)
- [Anti-Adversarially Manipulated Attributions for Weakly and Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.08896/) (2021)
- [Learning Affinity from Attention: End-to-End Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02664/) (2022)
- [BBAM: Bounding Box Attribution Map for Weakly Supervised Semantic and Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.08907/) (2021)
- [Learning random-walk label propagation for weakly-supervised semantic segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.00470/) (2018)
- [Constrained Convolutional Neural Networks for Weakly Supervised Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.03648/) (2015)
- [Self-supervised Image-specific Prototype Exploration for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02909/) (2022)
- [Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation by Pixel-to-Prototype Contrast](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07110/) (2021)
- [CIAN: Cross-Image Affinity Net for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.10842/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Depth Edge Alignment Loss: DEALing with Depth in Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.17702/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Image-level weakly-supervised semantic segmentation (WSSS) reduces the usually vast data annotation cost by surrogate segmentation masks during training. The typical approach involves training an image classification network using global average pooling (GAP) on convolutional feature maps. This enables the estimation of object locations based on class activation maps (CAMs), which identify the importance of image regions. The CAMs are then used to generate pseudo-labels, in the form of segmentation masks, to supervise a segmentation model in the absence of pixel-level ground truth. Our work is based on two techniques for improving CAMs; importance sampling, which is a substitute for GAP, and the feature similarity loss, which utilizes a heuristic that object contours almost always align with color edges in images. However, both are based on the multinomial posterior with softmax, and implicitly assume that classes are mutually exclusive, which turns out suboptimal in our experiments. Thus, we reformulate both techniques based on binomial posteriors of multiple independent binary problems. This has two benefits; their performance is improved and they become more general, resulting in an add-on method that can boost virtually any WSSS method. This is demonstrated on a wide variety of baselines on the PASCAL VOC dataset, improving the region similarity and contour quality of all implemented state-of-the-art methods. Experiments on the MS COCO dataset further show that our proposed add-on is well-suited for large-scale settings. Our code implementation is available at https://github.com/arvijj/hfpl.