# IBAFormer: Intra-batch Attention Transformer for Domain Generalized Semantic Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.06282 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.06282/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 40 of its 53 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Sep 2023.

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

- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [The Cityscapes Dataset for Semantic Urban Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.01685/) (2016)
- [SegFormer: Simple and Efficient Design for Semantic Segmentation with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.15203/) (2021)
- [Masked-attention Mask Transformer for Universal Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01527/) (2021)
- [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)
- [BDD100K: A Diverse Driving Dataset for Heterogeneous Multitask Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.04687/) (2018)
- [Tokens-to-Token ViT: Training Vision Transformers from Scratch on ImageNet](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.11986/) (2021)
- [CyCADA: Cycle-Consistent Adversarial Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.03213/) (2017)
- [CvT: Introducing Convolutions to Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15808/) (2021)
- [Playing for Data: Ground Truth from Computer Games](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.02192/) (2016)
- [CrossViT: Cross-Attention Multi-Scale Vision Transformer for Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14899/) (2021)
- [Two at Once: Enhancing Learning and Generalization Capacities via IBN-Net](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.09441/) (2018)
- [GMFlow: Learning Optical Flow via Global Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.13680/) (2021)
- [DAFormer: Improving Network Architectures and Training Strategies for Domain-Adaptive Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14887/) (2021)
- [Unifying Flow, Stereo and Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.05783/) (2022)
- [Domain Randomization and Pyramid Consistency: Simulation-to-Real Generalization without Accessing Target Domain Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.00889/) (2019)
- [RobustNet: Improving Domain Generalization in Urban-Scene Segmentation via Instance Selective Whitening](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15597/) (2021)
- [Vision Transformers are Robust Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.07581/) (2021)
- [FSDR: Frequency Space Domain Randomization for Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.02370/) (2021)
- [Understanding The Robustness in Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.12451/) (2022)
- [CrossFormer: A Versatile Vision Transformer Hinging on Cross-scale Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.00154/) (2021)
- [Style-Hallucinated Dual Consistency Learning for Domain Generalized Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02548/) (2022)
- [Synthetic Training for Accurate 3D Human Pose and Shape Estimation in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.10013/) (2020)
- [Semantic-Aware Domain Generalized Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.00822/) (2022)
- [WildNet: Learning Domain Generalized Semantic Segmentation from the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.01446/) (2022)
- [Adversarial Style Augmentation for Domain Generalized Urban-Scene Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.04892/) (2022)
- [Low-Latency Video Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.00389/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Mamba as a Bridge: Where Vision Foundation Models Meet Vision Language Models for Domain-Generalized Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.03193/) (2025)
- [Textual Query-Driven Mask Transformer for Domain Generalized Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.09033/) (2024)
- [Strong but simple: A Baseline for Domain Generalized Dense Perception by CLIP-based Transfer Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02021/) (2023)
- [Exploiting Domain Properties in Language-Driven Domain Generalization for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.03508/) (2025)
- [Domain Generalization for Semantic Segmentation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.03540/) (2025)
- [Hierarchical Prompt Injector for Domain Generalization Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.05864/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Domain generalized semantic segmentation (DGSS) is a critical yet challenging task, where the model is trained only on source data without access to any target data. Despite the proposal of numerous DGSS strategies, the generalization capability remains limited in CNN architectures. Though some Transformer-based segmentation models show promising performance, they primarily focus on capturing intra-sample attentive relationships, disregarding inter-sample correlations which can potentially benefit DGSS. To this end, we enhance the attention modules in Transformer networks for improving DGSS by incorporating information from other independent samples in the same batch, enriching contextual information, and diversifying the training data for each attention block. Specifically, we propose two alternative intra-batch attention mechanisms, namely mean-based intra-batch attention (MIBA) and element-wise intra-batch attention (EIBA), to capture correlations between different samples, enhancing feature representation and generalization capabilities. Building upon intra-batch attention, we introduce IBAFormer, which integrates self-attention modules with the proposed intra-batch attention for DGSS. Extensive experiments demonstrate that IBAFormer achieves SOTA performance in DGSS, and ablation studies further confirm the effectiveness of each introduced component.