# FVP: Fourier Visual Prompting for Source-Free Unsupervised Domain Adaptation of Medical Image Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.13672 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.13672/

## Key facts

- Cited by 21 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 40 of its 58 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Apr 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 40)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Prefix-Tuning: Optimizing Continuous Prompts for Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00190/) (2021)
- [The Power of Scale for Parameter-Efficient Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08691/) (2021)
- [DeepLab: Semantic Image Segmentation with Deep Convolutional Nets, Atrous Convolution, and Fully Connected CRFs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.00915/) (2016)
- [Domain-Adversarial Training of Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.07818/) (2015)
- [Learning to Prompt for Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01134/) (2021)
- [Pre-train, Prompt, and Predict: A Systematic Survey of Prompting Methods in Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.13586/) (2021)
- [Language Models as Knowledge Bases?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.01066/) (2019)
- [Visual Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12119/) (2022)
- [CyCADA: Cycle-Consistent Adversarial Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.03213/) (2017)
- [How Can We Know What Language Models Know?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.12543/) (2019)
- [Do We Really Need to Access the Source Data? Source Hypothesis Transfer for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.08546/) (2020)
- [Universal adversarial perturbations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.08401/) (2016)
- [Multimodal Few-Shot Learning with Frozen Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.13884/) (2021)
- [FDA: Fourier Domain Adaptation for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05498/) (2020)
- [Domain Adaptation for Medical Image Analysis: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09508/) (2021)
- [High Frequency Component Helps Explain the Generalization of Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.13545/) (2019)
- [CHAOS Challenge -- Combined (CT-MR) Healthy Abdominal Organ Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.06535/) (2020)
- [A Fourier-based Framework for Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.11120/) (2021)
- [Embracing Imperfect Datasets: A Review of Deep Learning Solutions for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10454/) (2019)
- [Source Data-absent Unsupervised Domain Adaptation through Hypothesis Transfer and Labeling Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.07297/) (2020)
- [Source-Free Domain Adaptation for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.16372/) (2021)
- [Model Adaptation: Historical Contrastive Learning for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation without Source Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.03374/) (2021)
- [Category Anchor-Guided Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13049/) (2019)
- [Unsupervised Bidirectional Cross-Modality Adaptation via Deeply Synergistic Image and Feature Alignment for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.02255/) (2020)
- [Self-Ensembling with GAN-based Data Augmentation for Domain Adaptation in Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.00589/) (2019)
- [Synergistic Image and Feature Adaptation: Towards Cross-Modality Domain Adaptation for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.08211/) (2019)
- [Source-free Domain Adaptation via Avatar Prototype Generation and Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.15326/) (2021)
- [All about Structure: Adapting Structural Information across Domains for Boosting Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.12212/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [SAM2-Adapter: Evaluating & Adapting Segment Anything 2 in Downstream Tasks: Camouflage, Shadow, Medical Image Segmentation, and More](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.04579/) (2024)
- [LLaFS: When Large Language Models Meet Few-Shot Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16926/) (2023)
- [POPEN: Preference-Based Optimization and Ensemble for LVLM-Based Reasoning Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.00640/) (2025)
- [Proxy Denoising for Source-Free Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.01658/) (2024)
- [Prompt-based Adaptation in Large-scale Vision Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.13219/) (2025)
- [Discrete Latent Perspective Learning for Segmentation and Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.10475/) (2024)
- [Q-Seg: Quantum Annealing-Based Unsupervised Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12912/) (2023)
- [FoPro-KD: Fourier Prompted Effective Knowledge Distillation for Long-Tailed Medical Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.17421/) (2023)
- [Structural and Statistical Texture Knowledge Distillation and Learning for Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.08043/) (2025)
- [SAM3-Adapter: Efficient Adaptation of Segment Anything 3 for Camouflage Object Segmentation, Shadow Detection, and Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.19425/) (2025)
- [Qubit-efficient Variational Quantum Algorithms for Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14405/) (2024)
- [Navigating Distribution Shifts in Medical Image Analysis: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.05824/) (2024)
- [Leveraging Segment Anything Model for Source-Free Domain Adaptation via Dual Feature Guided Auto-Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.08527/) (2025)
- [DDFP: Data-dependent Frequency Prompt for Source Free Domain Adaptation of Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09927/) (2025)
- [Unlocking Constraints: Source-Free Occlusion-Aware Seamless Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.21198/) (2025)
- [Neuroverse3D: Developing In-Context Learning Universal Model for Neuroimaging in 3D](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.02410/) (2025)
- [Proposal-Level Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Open World Unbiased Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.02342/) (2023)
- [Medical Visual Prompting (MVP): A Unified Framework for Versatile and High-Quality Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01127/) (2024)
- [Tell2Adapt: A Unified Framework for Source Free Unsupervised Domain Adaptation via Vision Foundation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.05012/) (2026)
- [From Adaptation to Generalization: Adaptive Visual Prompting for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.17455/) (2026)
- [SymmAdapt: Symmetrical Flow Matching for Source-Free Domain Adaptation in Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.22532/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Medical image segmentation methods normally perform poorly when there is a domain shift between training and testing data. Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) addresses the domain shift problem by training the model using both labeled data from the source domain and unlabeled data from the target domain. Source-Free UDA (SFUDA) was recently proposed for UDA without requiring the source data during the adaptation, due to data privacy or data transmission issues, which normally adapts the pre-trained deep model in the testing stage. However, in real clinical scenarios of medical image segmentation, the trained model is normally frozen in the testing stage. In this paper, we propose Fourier Visual Prompting (FVP) for SFUDA of medical image segmentation. Inspired by prompting learning in natural language processing, FVP steers the frozen pre-trained model to perform well in the target domain by adding a visual prompt to the input target data. In FVP, the visual prompt is parameterized using only a small amount of low-frequency learnable parameters in the input frequency space, and is learned by minimizing the segmentation loss between the predicted segmentation of the prompted target image and reliable pseudo segmentation label of the target image under the frozen model. To our knowledge, FVP is the first work to apply visual prompts to SFUDA for medical image segmentation. The proposed FVP is validated using three public datasets, and experiments demonstrate that FVP yields better segmentation results, compared with various existing methods.