# Scribble Hides Class: Promoting Scribble-Based Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation with Its Class Label

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.17555 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17555/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 23 of its 30 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Feb 2024.

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

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [DeepLab: Semantic Image Segmentation with Deep Convolutional Nets, Atrous Convolution, and Fully Connected CRFs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.00915/) (2016)
- [Encoder-Decoder with Atrous Separable Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.02611/) (2018)
- [Learning Deep Features for Discriminative Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.04150/) (2015)
- [When Does Label Smoothing Help?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02629/) (2019)
- [ScribbleSup: Scribble-Supervised Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.05144/) (2016)
- [Self-supervised Equivariant Attention Mechanism for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04581/) (2020)
- [BoxSup: Exploiting Bounding Boxes to Supervise Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.01640/) (2015)
- [Simple Does It: Weakly Supervised Instance and Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.07485/) (2016)
- [Seed, Expand and Constrain: Three Principles for Weakly-Supervised Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.06098/) (2016)
- [Weakly- and Semi-Supervised Learning of a DCNN for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.02734/) (2015)
- [On Regularized Losses for Weakly-supervised CNN Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.09569/) (2018)
- [Learning Affinity from Attention: End-to-End Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02664/) (2022)
- [Normalized Cut Loss for Weakly-supervised CNN Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.01346/) (2018)
- [BBAM: Bounding Box Attribution Map for Weakly Supervised Semantic and Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.08907/) (2021)
- [Learning random-walk label propagation for weakly-supervised semantic segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.00470/) (2018)
- [Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation by Iteratively Mining Common Object Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.04659/) (2018)
- [Tree Energy Loss: Towards Sparsely Annotated Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10739/) (2022)
- [Threshold Matters in WSSS: Manipulating the Activation for the Robust and Accurate Segmentation Model Against Thresholds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16045/) (2022)
- [Scribble-Supervised Semantic Segmentation by Uncertainty Reduction on Neural Representation and Self-Supervision on Neural Eigenspace](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09896/) (2021)
- [Weakly Supervised Object Localization as Domain Adaption](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01714/) (2022)
- [Seminar Learning for Click-Level Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.13393/) (2021)

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

- [Weakly Supervised Teacher-Student Framework with Progressive Pseudo-mask Refinement for Gland Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.08605/) (2026)
- [TABNet: A Triplet Augmentation Self-Recovery Framework with Boundary-Aware Pseudo-Labels for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.02399/) (2025)
- [Diffusion-Guided Knowledge Distillation for Weakly-Supervised Low-Light Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.07578/) (2025)
- [WP-CrackNet: A Collaborative Adversarial Learning Framework for End-to-End Weakly-Supervised Road Crack Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.17566/) (2025)
- [OBBSeg: Irregular Lesion Segmentation under Oriented Bounding Box Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.06007/) (2026)
- [Prompt-Conditioned Channel Attention for Hierarchical Feature Modulation toward Anatomy-Agnostic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.20229/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Scribble-based weakly-supervised semantic segmentation using sparse scribble supervision is gaining traction as it reduces annotation costs when compared to fully annotated alternatives. Existing methods primarily generate pseudo-labels by diffusing labeled pixels to unlabeled ones with local cues for supervision. However, this diffusion process fails to exploit global semantics and class-specific cues, which are important for semantic segmentation. In this study, we propose a class-driven scribble promotion network, which utilizes both scribble annotations and pseudo-labels informed by image-level classes and global semantics for supervision. Directly adopting pseudo-labels might misguide the segmentation model, thus we design a localization rectification module to correct foreground representations in the feature space. To further combine the advantages of both supervisions, we also introduce a distance entropy loss for uncertainty reduction, which adapts per-pixel confidence weights according to the reliable region determined by the scribble and pseudo-label's boundary. Experiments on the ScribbleSup dataset with different qualities of scribble annotations outperform all the previous methods, demonstrating the superiority and robustness of our method.The code is available at https://github.com/Zxl19990529/Class-driven-Scribble-Promotion-Network.
