# Semi-supervised Semantic Segmentation via Boosting Uncertainty on Unlabeled Data

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.18758 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.18758/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 30 of its 41 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 Nov 2023.

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

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Dropout as a Bayesian Approximation: Representing Model Uncertainty in Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02142/) (2015)
- [The Cityscapes Dataset for Semantic Urban Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.01685/) (2016)
- [Simple and Scalable Predictive Uncertainty Estimation using Deep Ensembles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01474/) (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)
- [What Uncertainties Do We Need in Bayesian Deep Learning for Computer Vision?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.04977/) (2017)
- [Improved Regularization of Convolutional Neural Networks with Cutout](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.04552/) (2017)
- [Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation with Cross Pseudo Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.01226/) (2021)
- [Regularization With Stochastic Transformations and Perturbations for Deep Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.04586/) (2016)
- [Learning with Pseudo-Ensembles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.4864/) (2014)
- [Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation Using Unreliable Pseudo-Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.03884/) (2022)
- [Semi-supervised Medical Image Segmentation through Dual-task Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.04448/) (2020)
- [ClassMix: Segmentation-Based Data Augmentation for Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.07936/) (2020)
- [ST++: Make Self-training Work Better for Semi-supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.05095/) (2021)
- [Dash: Semi-Supervised Learning with Dynamic Thresholding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.00650/) (2021)
- [Anti-Adversarially Manipulated Attributions for Weakly and Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.08896/) (2021)
- [Guided Collaborative Training for Pixel-wise Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.05258/) (2020)
- [Semi-supervised Semantic Segmentation with Directional Context-aware Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.14133/) (2021)
- [Efficient Semi-Supervised Gross Target Volume of Nasopharyngeal Carcinoma Segmentation via Uncertainty Rectified Pyramid Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.07042/) (2020)
- [Semi-Supervised Medical Image Segmentation via Cross Teaching between CNN and Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.04894/) (2021)
- [Semi-supervised Semantic Segmentation with Error Localization Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02078/) (2022)
- [Feature Alignment and Uniformity for Test Time Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.10902/) (2023)
- [A New PAC-Bayesian Perspective on Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.04573/) (2015)
- [Prototype Knowledge Distillation for Medical Segmentation with Missing Modality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.09830/) (2023)
- [Region-level Contrastive and Consistency Learning for Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.13314/) (2022)
- [Cross Contrasting Feature Perturbation for Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.12502/) (2023)
- [Aggregation of Disentanglement: Reconsidering Domain Variations in Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.02350/) (2023)
- [Black-box Source-free Domain Adaptation via Two-stage Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.07881/) (2023)
- [Towards Generalizable Medical Image Segmentation with Pixel-wise Uncertainty Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.07883/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We bring a new perspective to semi-supervised semantic segmentation by providing an analysis on the labeled and unlabeled distributions in training datasets. We first figure out that the distribution gap between labeled and unlabeled datasets cannot be ignored, even though the two datasets are sampled from the same distribution. To address this issue, we theoretically analyze and experimentally prove that appropriately boosting uncertainty on unlabeled data can help minimize the distribution gap, which benefits the generalization of the model. We propose two strategies and design an uncertainty booster algorithm, specially for semi-supervised semantic segmentation. Extensive experiments are carried out based on these theories, and the results confirm the efficacy of the algorithm and strategies. Our plug-and-play uncertainty booster is tiny, efficient, and robust to hyperparameters but can significantly promote performance. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance in our experiments compared to the current semi-supervised semantic segmentation methods on the popular benchmarks: Cityscapes and PASCAL VOC 2012 with different train settings.