# Diffusion-based Image Translation with Label Guidance for Domain Adaptive Semantic Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.12350 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12350/

## Key facts

- Cited by 27 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Medical imaging and segmentation, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 70 of its 87 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Aug 2023.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [Medical imaging and segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/medical-imaging-and-segmentation/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 70)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05233/) (2021)
- [Deep Unsupervised Learning using Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03585/) (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)
- [Improved Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09672/) (2021)
- [DeepLab: Semantic Image Segmentation with Deep Convolutional Nets, Atrous Convolution, and Fully Connected CRFs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.00915/) (2016)
- [Wide Residual Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.07146/) (2016)
- [Domain-Adversarial Training of Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.07818/) (2015)
- [SegFormer: Simple and Efficient Design for Semantic Segmentation with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.15203/) (2021)
- [SDEdit: Guided Image Synthesis and Editing with Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.01073/) (2021)
- [Structured Denoising Diffusion Models in Discrete State-Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03006/) (2021)
- [Spectral Normalization for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05957/) (2018)
- [CyCADA: Cycle-Consistent Adversarial Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.03213/) (2017)
- [Diffusion-LM Improves Controllable Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14217/) (2022)
- [Playing for Data: Ground Truth from Computer Games](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.02192/) (2016)
- [CCNet: Criss-Cross Attention for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.11721/) (2018)
- [Unpaired Image-to-Image Translation using Cycle-Consistent Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.10593/) (2017)
- [DiffusionCLIP: Text-Guided Diffusion Models for Robust Image Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.02711/) (2021)
- [Score-based Generative Modeling in Latent Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.05931/) (2021)
- [ILVR: Conditioning Method for Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.02938/) (2021)
- [FDA: Fourier Domain Adaptation for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05498/) (2020)
- [DiffuSeq: Sequence to Sequence Text Generation with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08933/) (2022)
- [Confidence Regularized Self-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.09822/) (2019)
- [DiffusionDet: Diffusion Model for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09788/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 27 of 27)

- [DGInStyle: Domain-Generalizable Semantic Segmentation with Image Diffusion Models and Stylized Semantic Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03048/) (2023)
- [Distribution-Aligned Diffusion for Human Mesh Recovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.13369/) (2023)
- [Unsupervised Domain Adaptation via Domain-Adaptive Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.13893/) (2023)
- [ODGEN: Domain-specific Object Detection Data Generation with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.15199/) (2024)
- [Improving In-Context Learning in Diffusion Models with Visual Context-Modulated Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.01408/) (2023)
- [Style Transfer with Diffusion Models for Synthetic-to-Real Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.16360/) (2025)
- [Diffusion Features to Bridge Domain Gap for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.00777/) (2024)
- [Noise Calibration: Plug-and-play Content-Preserving Video Enhancement using Pre-trained Video Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.10285/) (2024)
- [Towards Unsupervised Domain Bridging via Image Degradation in Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.10339/) (2024)
- [Language-Guided Instance-Aware Domain-Adaptive Panoptic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.03799/) (2024)
- [DUDA: Distilled Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Lightweight Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.09814/) (2025)
- [Diffusion-Based Particle-DETR for BEV Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.11578/) (2023)
- [SG-LDM: Semantic-Guided LiDAR Generation via Latent-Aligned Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.23606/) (2025)
- [Stable-Sim2Real: Exploring Simulation of Real-Captured 3D Data with Two-Stage Depth Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.23483/) (2025)
- [Balanced Learning for Domain Adaptive Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.06886/) (2025)
- [VFM-UDA++: Improving Network Architectures and Data Strategies for Unsupervised Domain Adaptive Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.10685/) (2025)
- [What is the Added Value of UDA in the VFM Era?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.18190/) (2025)
- [Beyond the Seen: Bounded Distribution Estimation for Open-Vocabulary Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.04770/) (2025)
- [DA-Cal: Towards Cross-Domain Calibration in Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.20860/) (2026)
- [Unlocking Diffusion Hierarchies: Adaptive Timestep Selection for Zero-Shot Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.15590/) (2026)
- [Beyond Traditional Single Object Tracking: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.10439/) (2024)
- [Text Image Generation for Low-Resource Languages with Dual Translation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.17747/) (2024)
- [Reducing Semantic Ambiguity In Domain Adaptive Semantic Segmentation Via Probabilistic Prototypical Pixel Contrast](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.18543/) (2024)
- [Inverse Entropic Optimal Transport Solves Semi-supervised Learning via Data Likelihood Maximization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.02628/) (2024)
- [Multi-Channel Uncertainty-Weighted Score Matching for Conditional Diffusion in Medical UDA](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.22476/) (2025)
- [A Framework for Low-Effort Training Data Generation for Urban Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.11567/) (2025)
- [Monocular Depth Estimation From the Perspective of Feature Restoration: A Diffusion Enhanced Depth Restoration Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.07664/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Translating images from a source domain to a target domain for learning target models is one of the most common strategies in domain adaptive semantic segmentation (DASS). However, existing methods still struggle to preserve semantically-consistent local details between the original and translated images. In this work, we present an innovative approach that addresses this challenge by using source-domain labels as explicit guidance during image translation. Concretely, we formulate cross-domain image translation as a denoising diffusion process and utilize a novel Semantic Gradient Guidance (SGG) method to constrain the translation process, conditioning it on the pixel-wise source labels. Additionally, a Progressive Translation Learning (PTL) strategy is devised to enable the SGG method to work reliably across domains with large gaps. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our approach over state-of-the-art methods.