# Background Activation Suppression for Weakly Supervised Object Localization and Semantic Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.12943 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.12943/

## Key facts

- Cited by 17 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 61 of its 88 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Sep 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 61)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [Grad-CAM: Visual Explanations from Deep Networks via Gradient-based Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02391/) (2016)
- [Rethinking the Inception Architecture for Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.00567/) (2015)
- [MobileNets: Efficient Convolutional Neural Networks for Mobile Vision Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04861/) (2017)
- [DeepLab: Semantic Image Segmentation with Deep Convolutional Nets, Atrous Convolution, and Fully Connected CRFs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.00915/) (2016)
- [CutMix: Regularization Strategy to Train Strong Classifiers with Localizable Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.04899/) (2019)
- [Learning Deep Features for Discriminative Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.04150/) (2015)
- [Semantic Image Segmentation with Deep Convolutional Nets and Fully Connected CRFs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.7062/) (2014)
- [Learning Pixel-level Semantic Affinity with Image-level Supervision for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.10464/) (2018)
- [Self-supervised Equivariant Attention Mechanism for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04581/) (2020)
- [Weakly Supervised Learning of Instance Segmentation with Inter-pixel Relations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05044/) (2019)
- [Causal Intervention for Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.12547/) (2020)
- [Hide-and-Seek: Forcing a Network to be Meticulous for Weakly-supervised Object and Action Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04232/) (2017)
- [Object Region Mining with Adversarial Erasing: A Simple Classification to Semantic Segmentation Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.08448/) (2017)
- [Seed, Expand and Constrain: Three Principles for Weakly-Supervised Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.06098/) (2016)
- [Wider or Deeper: Revisiting the ResNet Model for Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.10080/) (2016)
- [Tell Me Where to Look: Guided Attention Inference Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.10171/) (2018)
- [Adversarial Complementary Learning for Weakly Supervised Object Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.06962/) (2018)
- [Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation via Sub-category Exploration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.01183/) (2020)
- [Railroad is not a Train: Saliency as Pseudo-pixel Supervision for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.08965/) (2021)
- [Attention-based Dropout Layer for Weakly Supervised Object Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10028/) (2019)
- [Learning Affinity from Attention: End-to-End Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02664/) (2022)
- [Evaluating Weakly Supervised Object Localization Methods Right](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.07437/) (2020)
- [Self-supervised Image-specific Prototype Exploration for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02909/) (2022)
- [Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation by Pixel-to-Prototype Contrast](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07110/) (2021)
- [Weakly Supervised Object Localization and Detection: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07918/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [LEMON: Learning 3D Human-Object Interaction Relation from 2D Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.08963/) (2023)
- [Improved Video VAE for Latent Video Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.06449/) (2024)
- [Benchmarking Large Vision-Language Models via Directed Scene Graph for Comprehensive Image Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.08614/) (2024)
- [GREAT: Geometry-Intention Collaborative Inference for Open-Vocabulary 3D Object Affordance Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.19626/) (2024)
- [MMAR: Towards Lossless Multi-Modal Auto-Regressive Probabilistic Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.10798/) (2024)
- [iSeg: An Iterative Refinement-based Framework for Training-free Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.03209/) (2024)
- [MambaPupil: Bidirectional Selective Recurrent model for Event-based Eye tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.12083/) (2024)
- [MATE: Motion-Augmented Temporal Consistency for Event-based Point Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.01300/) (2024)
- [MIP-GAF: A MLLM-annotated Benchmark for Most Important Person Localization and Group Context Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.06224/) (2024)
- [Pixel-Level Domain Adaptation: A New Perspective for Enhancing Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.02039/) (2024)
- [Quantifying Context Bias in Domain Adaptation for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.14679/) (2024)
- [Background Matters: A Cross-view Bidirectional Modeling Framework for Semi-supervised Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.16625/) (2025)
- [PAID: Pairwise Angular-Invariant Decomposition for Continual Test-Time Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.02453/) (2025)
- [Unlocking 3D Affordance Segmentation with 2D Semantic Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.08316/) (2025)
- [CLARiTy: A Vision Transformer for Multi-Label Classification and Weakly-Supervised Localization of Chest X-ray Pathologies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.16700/) (2025)
- [Mitigating Context Bias in Domain Adaptation for Object Detection using Mask Pooling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.18446/) (2025)
- [Mining Multi-Modality Spatio-Temporal Cues for Video Important Person Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.28604/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Weakly supervised object localization and semantic segmentation aim to localize objects using only image-level labels. Recently, a new paradigm has emerged by generating a foreground prediction map (FPM) to achieve pixel-level localization. While existing FPM-based methods use cross-entropy to evaluate the foreground prediction map and to guide the learning of the generator, this paper presents two astonishing experimental observations on the object localization learning process: For a trained network, as the foreground mask expands, 1) the cross-entropy converges to zero when the foreground mask covers only part of the object region. 2) The activation value continuously increases until the foreground mask expands to the object boundary. Therefore, to achieve a more effective localization performance, we argue for the usage of activation value to learn more object regions. In this paper, we propose a Background Activation Suppression (BAS) method. Specifically, an Activation Map Constraint (AMC) module is designed to facilitate the learning of generator by suppressing the background activation value. Meanwhile, by using foreground region guidance and area constraint, BAS can learn the whole region of the object. In the inference phase, we consider the prediction maps of different categories together to obtain the final localization results. Extensive experiments show that BAS achieves significant and consistent improvement over the baseline methods on the CUB-200-2011 and ILSVRC datasets. In addition, our method also achieves state-of-the-art weakly supervised semantic segmentation performance on the PASCAL VOC 2012 and MS COCO 2014 datasets. Code and models are available at https://github.com/wpy1999/BAS-Extension.