# CorrMatch: Label Propagation via Correlation Matching for Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.04300 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.04300/

## Key facts

- Cited by 44 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 63 of its 89 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Jun 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 63)

- [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)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03167/) (2015)
- [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)
- [Encoder-Decoder with Atrous Separable Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.02611/) (2018)
- [CutMix: Regularization Strategy to Train Strong Classifiers with Localizable Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.04899/) (2019)
- [Aggregated Residual Transformations for Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.05431/) (2016)
- [Pyramid Scene Parsing Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01105/) (2016)
- [FixMatch: Simplifying Semi-Supervised Learning with Consistency and Confidence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.07685/) (2020)
- [MixMatch: A Holistic Approach to Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02249/) (2019)
- [Self-training with Noisy Student improves ImageNet classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.04252/) (2019)
- [Temporal Ensembling for Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02242/) (2016)
- [Virtual Adversarial Training: A Regularization Method for Supervised and Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.03976/) (2017)
- [Training Region-based Object Detectors with Online Hard Example Mining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.03540/) (2016)
- [FlexMatch: Boosting Semi-Supervised Learning with Curriculum Pseudo Labeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.08263/) (2021)
- [Res2Net: A New Multi-scale Backbone Architecture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01169/) (2019)
- [Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation with Cross Pseudo Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.01226/) (2021)
- [ResNeSt: Split-Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.08955/) (2020)
- [Regularization With Stochastic Transformations and Perturbations for Deep Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.04586/) (2016)
- [Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation with Cross-Consistency Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.09005/) (2020)
- [Rethinking Pre-training and Self-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.06882/) (2020)
- [Self-supervised Equivariant Attention Mechanism for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04581/) (2020)
- [A Simple Semi-Supervised Learning Framework for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.04757/) (2020)
- [SegNeXt: Rethinking Convolutional Attention Design for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.08575/) (2022)
- [Learning with Pseudo-Ensembles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.4864/) (2014)
- [FreeMatch: Self-adaptive Thresholding for Semi-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.07246/) (2022)
- [Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation Using Unreliable Pseudo-Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.03884/) (2022)
- [Unsupervised Semantic Segmentation by Contrasting Object Mask Proposals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.06191/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 44)

- [DFormerv2: Geometry Self-Attention for RGBD Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.04701/) (2025)
- [LLaVA-Scissor: Token Compression with Semantic Connected Components for Video LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.21862/) (2025)
- [Generative Multi-modal Models are Good Class-Incremental Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.18383/) (2024)
- [LPOSS: Label Propagation Over Patches and Pixels for Open-vocabulary Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.19777/) (2025)
- [Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation Based on Pseudo-Labels: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.01909/) (2024)
- [Depth Anything at Any Condition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.01634/) (2025)
- [RESMatch: Referring Expression Segmentation in a Semi-Supervised Manner](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.05589/) (2024)
- [High-Resolution Cloud Detection Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.07365/) (2024)
- [PrevMatch: Revisiting and Maximizing Temporal Knowledge in Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.20610/) (2024)
- [Uncertainty-Participation Context Consistency Learning for Semi-supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.17331/) (2024)
- [When Confidence Fails: Revisiting Pseudo-Label Selection in Semi-supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.16704/) (2025)
- [Feedback-Driven Pseudo-Label Reliability Assessment: Redefining Thresholding for Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.07691/) (2025)
- [Learning Disentangled Stain and Structural Representations for Semi-Supervised Histopathology Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.03923/) (2025)
- [ConformalSAM: Unlocking the Potential of Foundational Segmentation Models in Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation with Conformal Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.15803/) (2025)
- [Rethinking Semi-supervised Segmentation Beyond Accuracy: Reliability and Robustness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.05917/) (2025)
- [DEARLi: Decoupled Enhancement of Recognition and Localization for Semi-supervised Panoptic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.10118/) (2025)
- [S5: Scalable Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation in Remote Sensing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.12409/) (2025)
- [Enhancing Representations through Heterogeneous Self-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.05108/) (2023)
- [SS-ADA: A Semi-Supervised Active Domain Adaptation Framework for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.12788/) (2024)
- [IGL-DT: Iterative Global-Local Feature Learning with Dual-Teacher Semantic Segmentation Framework under Limited Annotation Scheme](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.09797/) (2025)
- [FARCLUSS: Fuzzy Adaptive Rebalancing and Contrastive Uncertainty Learning for Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.11142/) (2025)
- [Towards Robust Pseudo-Label Learning in Semantic Segmentation: An Encoding Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.06870/) (2025)
- [UniSemAlign: Text-Prototype Alignment with a Foundation Encoder for Semi-Supervised Histopathology Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.09169/) (2026)
- [First-frame Supervised Video Polyp Segmentation via Propagative and Semantic Dual-teacher Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.16503/) (2024)
- [Exploring Token-Level Augmentation in Vision Transformer for Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.02459/) (2025)
- [Knowledge Consultation for Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.10693/) (2025)
- [Adaptive Spatial Augmentation for Semi-supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.23438/) (2025)
- [RS-MTDF: Multi-Teacher Distillation and Fusion for Remote Sensing Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.08772/) (2025)
- [TSE-Net: Semi-supervised Monocular Height Estimation from Single Remote Sensing Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.13552/) (2025)
- [Exploiting Minority Pseudo-Labels for Semi-Supervised Fine-grained Road Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12680/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper presents a simple but performant semi-supervised semantic segmentation approach, called CorrMatch. Previous approaches mostly employ complicated training strategies to leverage unlabeled data but overlook the role of correlation maps in modeling the relationships between pairs of locations. We observe that the correlation maps not only enable clustering pixels of the same category easily but also contain good shape information, which previous works have omitted. Motivated by these, we aim to improve the use efficiency of unlabeled data by designing two novel label propagation strategies. First, we propose to conduct pixel propagation by modeling the pairwise similarities of pixels to spread the high-confidence pixels and dig out more. Then, we perform region propagation to enhance the pseudo labels with accurate class-agnostic masks extracted from the correlation maps. CorrMatch achieves great performance on popular segmentation benchmarks. Taking the DeepLabV3+ with ResNet-101 backbone as our segmentation model, we receive a 76%+ mIoU score on the Pascal VOC 2012 dataset with only 92 annotated images. Code is available at https://github.com/BBBBchan/CorrMatch.
