# Survey on Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Semantic Segmentation for Visual Perception in Automated Driving

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.11928 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.11928/

## Key facts

- Cited by 29 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 199 of its 253 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Apr 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 199)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [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)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Fully Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4038/) (2014)
- [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)
- [Distributed Representations of Words and Phrases and their Compositionality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1310.4546/) (2013)
- [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)
- [CutMix: Regularization Strategy to Train Strong Classifiers with Localizable Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.04899/) (2019)
- [Perceptual Losses for Real-Time Style Transfer and Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08155/) (2016)
- [CARLA: An Open Urban Driving Simulator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.03938/) (2017)
- [Conditional Generative Adversarial Nets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.1784/) (2014)
- [Arbitrary Style Transfer in Real-time with Adaptive Instance Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06868/) (2017)
- [Pyramid Vision Transformer: A Versatile Backbone for Dense Prediction without Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12122/) (2021)
- [Unsupervised Domain Adaptation by Backpropagation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.7495/) (2014)
- [ImageNet-trained CNNs are biased towards texture; increasing shape bias improves accuracy and robustness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.12231/) (2018)
- [BDD100K: A Diverse Driving Dataset for Heterogeneous Multitask Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.04687/) (2018)
- [Instance Normalization: The Missing Ingredient for Fast Stylization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.08022/) (2016)
- [CyCADA: Cycle-Consistent Adversarial Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.03213/) (2017)
- [StarGAN: Unified Generative Adversarial Networks for Multi-Domain Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.09020/) (2017)
- [Transformers in Vision: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.01169/) (2021)
- [Least Squares Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.04076/) (2016)
- [A Review of Uncertainty Quantification in Deep Learning: Techniques, Applications and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.06225/) (2020)
- [Playing for Data: Ground Truth from Computer Games](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.02192/) (2016)
- [Multimodal Unsupervised Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.04732/) (2018)
- [Maximum Classifier Discrepancy for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.02560/) (2017)

## Built on by (most cited first, 29 of 29)

- [A Survey on Autonomous Driving Datasets: Statistics, Annotation Quality, and a Future Outlook](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.01454/) (2024)
- [DiffCAD: Weakly-Supervised Probabilistic CAD Model Retrieval and Alignment from an RGB Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.18610/) (2023)
- [Generalization by Adaptation: Diffusion-Based Domain Extension for Domain-Generalized Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.01850/) (2023)
- [Strong but simple: A Baseline for Domain Generalized Dense Perception by CLIP-based Transfer Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02021/) (2023)
- [EventFly: Event Camera Perception from Ground to the Sky](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.19916/) (2025)
- [Have We Ever Encountered This Before? Retrieving Out-of-Distribution Road Obstacles from Driving Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.04302/) (2023)
- [A Re-Parameterized Vision Transformer (ReVT) for Domain-Generalized Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.13331/) (2023)
- [Domain-Adaptive Neural Posterior Estimation for Strong Gravitational Lens Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.16347/) (2024)
- [When Cars meet Drones: Hyperbolic Federated Learning for Source-Free Domain Adaptation in Adverse Weather](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.13762/) (2024)
- [SemiDAViL: Semi-supervised Domain Adaptation with Vision-Language Guidance for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.06389/) (2025)
- [Gradient-based Class Weighting for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation in Dense Prediction Visual Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.01327/) (2024)
- [DUDA: Distilled Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Lightweight Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.09814/) (2025)
- [Generative AI for Autonomous Driving: A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.15863/) (2025)
- [FlyAwareV2: A Multimodal Cross-Domain UAV Dataset for Urban Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.13243/) (2025)
- [Leveraging Contrastive Learning for Semantic Segmentation with Consistent Labels Across Varying Appearances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.16592/) (2024)
- [Unsupervised Class Generation to Expand Semantic Segmentation Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.02264/) (2025)
- [MaskAdapt: Unsupervised Geometry-Aware Domain Adaptation Using Multimodal Contextual Learning and RGB-Depth Masking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.24026/) (2025)
- [MVAdapt: Zero-Shot Multi-Vehicle Adaptation for End-to-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.11854/) (2026)
- [Adversarial Manhole: Challenging Monocular Depth Estimation and Semantic Segmentation Models with Patch Attack](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.14879/) (2024)
- [A Study on Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Semantic Segmentation in the Era of Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.16407/) (2024)
- [CrackUDA: Incremental Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Improved Crack Segmentation in Civil Structures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.15637/) (2024)
- [Domain Generalization for Semantic Segmentation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.03540/) (2025)
- [Empowering GNNs for Domain Adaptation via Denoising Target Graph](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.06236/) (2025)
- [OMUDA: Omni-level Masking for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation in Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.12303/) (2025)
- [Test-Time Modification: Inverse Domain Transformation for Robust Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.13454/) (2025)
- [IRL-DAL: Safe and Adaptive Trajectory Planning for Autonomous Driving via Energy-Guided Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.23266/) (2026)
- [GOLD-BEV: GrOund and aeriaL Data for Dense Semantic BEV Mapping of Dynamic Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.19411/) (2026)
- [Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Sim-to-Real Object Pose Estimation with Contrastive Alignment and Pseudo-Label Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.21287/) (2026)
- [When to Adapt: Multi-Signal Domain Shift Detection for Efficient Training-Free Adaptation in Open-Vocabulary Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.37602/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have proven their capabilities in many areas in the past years, such as robotics, or automated driving, enabling technological breakthroughs. DNNs play a significant role in environment perception for the challenging application of automated driving and are employed for tasks such as detection, semantic segmentation, and sensor fusion. Despite this progress and tremendous research efforts, several issues still need to be addressed that limit the applicability of DNNs in automated driving. The bad generalization of DNNs to new, unseen domains is a major problem on the way to a safe, large-scale application, because manual annotation of new domains is costly, particularly for semantic segmentation. For this reason, methods are required to adapt DNNs to new domains without labeling effort. The task, which these methods aim to solve is termed unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA). While several different domain shifts can challenge DNNs, the shift between synthetic and real data is of particular importance for automated driving, as it allows the use of simulation environments for DNN training. In this work, we present an overview of the current state of the art in this field of research. We categorize and explain the different approaches for UDA. The number of considered publications is larger than any other survey on this topic. The scope of this survey goes far beyond the description of the UDA state-of-the-art. Based on our large data and knowledge base, we present a quantitative comparison of the approaches and use the observations to point out the latest trends in this field. In the following, we conduct a critical analysis of the state-of-the-art and highlight promising future research directions. With this survey, we aim to facilitate UDA research further and encourage scientists to exploit novel research directions to generalize DNNs better.