# SFC: Shared Feature Calibration in Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.11719 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.11719/

## Key facts

- Cited by 19 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 23 of its 31 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Jan 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 23 of 23)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [DeepLab: Semantic Image Segmentation with Deep Convolutional Nets, Atrous Convolution, and Fully Connected CRFs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.00915/) (2016)
- [Learning Deep Features for Discriminative Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.04150/) (2015)
- [Image Segmentation Using Deep Learning: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.05566/) (2020)
- [Self-supervised Equivariant Attention Mechanism for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04581/) (2020)
- [Causal Intervention for Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.12547/) (2020)
- [SLCA: Slow Learner with Classifier Alignment for Continual Learning on a Pre-trained Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05118/) (2023)
- [Mining Cross-Image Semantics for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.01947/) (2020)
- [Anti-Adversarially Manipulated Attributions for Weakly and Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.08896/) (2021)
- [Distribution-Balanced Loss for Multi-Label Classification in Long-Tailed Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.09654/) (2020)
- [Equalization Loss v2: A New Gradient Balance Approach for Long-tailed Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.08548/) (2020)
- [Non-Salient Region Object Mining for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14581/) (2021)
- [Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation by Pixel-to-Prototype Contrast](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07110/) (2021)
- [Leveraging Auxiliary Tasks with Affinity Learning for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.11787/) (2021)
- [Object-Part Attention Model for Fine-grained Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.01740/) (2017)
- [Group-Wise Semantic Mining for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.05007/) (2020)
- [Threshold Matters in WSSS: Manipulating the Activation for the Robust and Accurate Segmentation Model Against Thresholds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16045/) (2022)
- [BatchFormer: Learning to Explore Sample Relationships for Robust Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01522/) (2022)
- [CTP: Towards Vision-Language Continual Pretraining via Compatible Momentum Contrast and Topology Preservation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.07146/) (2023)
- [Mining Unseen Classes via Regional Objectness: A Simple Baseline for Incremental Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.06866/) (2022)
- [Proper Reuse of Image Classification Features Improves Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.00484/) (2022)
- [Group Based Deep Shared Feature Learning for Fine-grained Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.01817/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [Towards the Uncharted: Density-Descending Feature Perturbation for Semi-supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.06462/) (2024)
- [Hunting Attributes: Context Prototype-Aware Learning for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.07630/) (2024)
- [Prompt Categories Cluster for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.13823/) (2024)
- [Image Augmentation Agent for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.20439/) (2024)
- [Continual Segmentation with Disentangled Objectness Learning and Class Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03477/) (2024)
- [Exploring CLIP's Dense Knowledge for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20826/) (2025)
- [MSWAL: 3D Multi-class Segmentation of Whole Abdominal Lesions Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.13560/) (2025)
- [DOEI: Dual Optimization of Embedding Information for Attention-Enhanced Class Activation Maps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.15885/) (2025)
- [From Few to More: Scribble-based Medical Image Segmentation via Masked Context Modeling and Continuous Pseudo Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.12814/) (2024)
- [Enjoying Information Dividend: Gaze Track-based Medical Weakly Supervised Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.22230/) (2025)
- [Completely Weakly Supervised Class-Incremental Learning for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.10781/) (2025)
- [Contrastive Prompt Clustering for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.17009/) (2025)
- [Localized Region Guidance for Class Activation Mapping in WSSS](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.12496/) (2025)
- [SynthSeg-Agents: Multi-Agent Synthetic Data Generation for Zero-Shot Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.15310/) (2025)
- [Confidence-Aware Self-Distillation for Multimodal Sentiment Analysis with Incomplete Modalities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.01490/) (2025)
- [Split-Fuse-Transport: Annotation-Free Saliency via Dual Clustering and Optimal Transport Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.17484/) (2025)
- [Region-CAM: Towards Accurate Object Regions in Class Activation Maps for Weakly Supervised Learning Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.25134/) (2025)
- [DiCLIP: Diffusion Model Enhances CLIP's Dense Knowledge for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.04593/) (2026)
- [CRISP: Calibration-Aware Visual State Space Duality for Remote Sensing Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.23746/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Image-level weakly supervised semantic segmentation has received increasing attention due to its low annotation cost. Existing methods mainly rely on Class Activation Mapping (CAM) to obtain pseudo-labels for training semantic segmentation models. In this work, we are the first to demonstrate that long-tailed distribution in training data can cause the CAM calculated through classifier weights over-activated for head classes and under-activated for tail classes due to the shared features among head- and tail- classes. This degrades pseudo-label quality and further influences final semantic segmentation performance. To address this issue, we propose a Shared Feature Calibration (SFC) method for CAM generation. Specifically, we leverage the class prototypes that carry positive shared features and propose a Multi-Scaled Distribution-Weighted (MSDW) consistency loss for narrowing the gap between the CAMs generated through classifier weights and class prototypes during training. The MSDW loss counterbalances over-activation and under-activation by calibrating the shared features in head-/tail-class classifier weights. Experimental results show that our SFC significantly improves CAM boundaries and achieves new state-of-the-art performances. The project is available at https://github.com/Barrett-python/SFC.