# Contrast, Stylize and Adapt: Unsupervised Contrastive Learning Framework for Domain Adaptive Semantic Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.09098 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.09098/

## Key facts

- Cited by 11 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 52 of its 66 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Jun 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 52)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [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)
- [SegFormer: Simple and Efficient Design for Semantic Segmentation with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.15203/) (2021)
- [Learning Deep Features for Discriminative Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.04150/) (2015)
- [Rethinking Atrous Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.05587/) (2017)
- [Arbitrary Style Transfer in Real-time with Adaptive Instance Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06868/) (2017)
- [SegNet: A Deep Convolutional Encoder-Decoder Architecture for Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.00561/) (2015)
- [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)
- [Unpaired Image-to-Image Translation using Cycle-Consistent Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.10593/) (2017)
- [Prototypical Contrastive Learning of Unsupervised Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.04966/) (2020)
- [Contrastive Learning for Unpaired Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.15651/) (2020)
- [ADVENT: Adversarial Entropy Minimization for Domain Adaptation in Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.12833/) (2018)
- [FDA: Fourier Domain Adaptation for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05498/) (2020)
- [Bidirectional Learning for Domain Adaptation of Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.10620/) (2019)
- [DAFormer: Improving Network Architectures and Training Strategies for Domain-Adaptive Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14887/) (2021)
- [Taking A Closer Look at Domain Shift: Category-level Adversaries for Semantics Consistent Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.09478/) (2018)
- [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)
- [Exploring Cross-Image Pixel Contrast for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.11939/) (2021)
- [DACS: Domain Adaptation via Cross-domain Mixed Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.08702/) (2020)
- [Rectifying Pseudo Label Learning via Uncertainty Estimation for Domain Adaptive Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.03773/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Intra-domain Adaptation for Semantic Segmentation through Self-Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07703/) (2020)
- [Generate To Adapt: Aligning Domains using Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.01705/) (2017)
- [Image to Image Translation for Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.00479/) (2017)
- [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)

## Built on by (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [Generalization by Adaptation: Diffusion-Based Domain Extension for Domain-Generalized Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.01850/) (2023)
- [Language-Guided Instance-Aware Domain-Adaptive Panoptic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.03799/) (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)
- [Unsupervised Domain Adaptive Lane Detection via Contextual Contrast and Aggregation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.13328/) (2024)
- [Reducing Semantic Ambiguity In Domain Adaptive Semantic Segmentation Via Probabilistic Prototypical Pixel Contrast](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.18543/) (2024)
- [Dictionary-based Framework for Interpretable and Consistent Object Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.19540/) (2025)
- [Masked Representation Modeling for Domain-Adaptive Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.13801/) (2025)
- [Instance-Aware Pseudo-Labeling and Class-Focused Contrastive Learning for Weakly Supervised Domain Adaptive Segmentation of Electron Microscopy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.16450/) (2025)
- [OMUDA: Omni-level Masking for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation in Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.12303/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

To overcome the domain gap between synthetic and real-world datasets, unsupervised domain adaptation methods have been proposed for semantic segmentation. Majority of the previous approaches have attempted to reduce the gap either at the pixel or feature level, disregarding the fact that the two components interact positively. To address this, we present CONtrastive FEaTure and pIxel alignment (CONFETI) for bridging the domain gap at both the pixel and feature levels using a unique contrastive formulation. We introduce well-estimated prototypes by including category-wise cross-domain information to link the two alignments: the pixel-level alignment is achieved using the jointly trained style transfer module with the prototypical semantic consistency, while the feature-level alignment is enforced to cross-domain features with the pixel-to-prototype contrast. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods using DeepLabV2. Our code is available at https://github.com/cxa9264/CONFETI