# DuPL: Dual Student with Trustworthy Progressive Learning for Robust Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.11184 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11184/

## Key facts

- Cited by 17 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 42 of its 47 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Mar 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 42)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Bootstrap your own latent: A new approach to self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07733/) (2020)
- [Exploring Simple Siamese Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10566/) (2020)
- [Learning Deep Features for Discriminative Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.04150/) (2015)
- [RandAugment: Practical automated data augmentation with a reduced search space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.13719/) (2019)
- [Co-teaching: Robust Training of Deep Neural Networks with Extremely Noisy Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.06872/) (2018)
- [Temporal Ensembling for Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02242/) (2016)
- [A Closer Look at Memorization in Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.05394/) (2017)
- [DivideMix: Learning with Noisy Labels as Semi-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.07394/) (2020)
- [Learning to Reweight Examples for Robust Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.09050/) (2018)
- [ImageNet-21K Pretraining for the Masses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.10972/) (2021)
- [Pseudo-Labeling and Confirmation Bias in Deep Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.02983/) (2019)
- [Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation with Cross Pseudo Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.01226/) (2021)
- [Early-Learning Regularization Prevents Memorization of Noisy Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.00151/) (2020)
- [Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation with Cross-Consistency Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.09005/) (2020)
- [ScribbleSup: Scribble-Supervised Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.05144/) (2016)
- [Learning Pixel-level Semantic Affinity with Image-level Supervision for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.10464/) (2018)
- [Weakly Supervised Learning of Instance Segmentation with Inter-pixel Relations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05044/) (2019)
- [Learning with Pseudo-Ensembles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.4864/) (2014)
- [Seed, Expand and Constrain: Three Principles for Weakly-Supervised Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.06098/) (2016)
- [Single-Stage Semantic Segmentation from Image Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.08104/) (2020)
- [Deep Co-Training for Semi-Supervised Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.05984/) (2018)
- [Multi-class Token Transformer for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02891/) (2022)
- [Railroad is not a Train: Saliency as Pseudo-pixel Supervision for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.08965/) (2021)
- [Learning Affinity from Attention: End-to-End Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02664/) (2022)
- [CLIP is Also an Efficient Segmenter: A Text-Driven Approach for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09506/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Reliability Does Matter: An End-to-End Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.08039/) (2019)

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

- [Exploring CLIP's Dense Knowledge for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20826/) (2025)
- [Tuning-free Universally-Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14294/) (2024)
- [Exact: Exploring Space-Time Perceptive Clues for Weakly Supervised Satellite Image Time Series Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.03968/) (2024)
- [Know Your Attention Maps: Class-specific Token Masking for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.06848/) (2025)
- [Mitigating Spurious Correlations in Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation via Cross-architecture Consistency Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.21959/) (2025)
- [Emerging Trends in Pseudo-Label Refinement for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation with Image-Level Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.21587/) (2025)
- [Deeply Dual Supervised learning for melanoma recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.01994/) (2025)
- [Edge Detection for Organ Boundaries via Top Down Refinement and SubPixel Upsampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.06805/) (2025)
- [DualResolution Residual Architecture with Artifact Suppression for Melanocytic Lesion Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.06816/) (2025)
- [VesselRW: Weakly Supervised Subcutaneous Vessel Segmentation via Learned Random Walk Propagation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.06819/) (2025)
- [Lightweight Transformer Framework for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.19765/) (2025)
- [SAPNet++: Evolving Point-Prompted Instance Segmentation with Semantic and Spatial Awareness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.21762/) (2026)
- [ModuSeg: Decoupling Object Discovery and Semantic Retrieval for Training-Free Weakly Supervised Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.07021/) (2026)
- [DiCLIP: Diffusion Model Enhances CLIP's Dense Knowledge for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.04593/) (2026)
- [Single-Stage Hierarchical Rectification for Weakly Supervised Histopathology Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.20250/) (2026)
- [APRIL-MedSeg: A Modular Medical Image Segmentation Toolbox Embracing Modern Paradigms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.30577/) (2026)
- [CRF Loss is How Networks Should Learn Boundaries in Weakly Supervised Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.34183/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recently, One-stage Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation (WSSS) with image-level labels has gained increasing interest due to simplification over its cumbersome multi-stage counterpart. Limited by the inherent ambiguity of Class Activation Map (CAM), we observe that one-stage pipelines often encounter confirmation bias caused by incorrect CAM pseudo-labels, impairing their final segmentation performance. Although recent works discard many unreliable pseudo-labels to implicitly alleviate this issue, they fail to exploit sufficient supervision for their models. To this end, we propose a dual student framework with trustworthy progressive learning (DuPL). Specifically, we propose a dual student network with a discrepancy loss to yield diverse CAMs for each sub-net. The two sub-nets generate supervision for each other, mitigating the confirmation bias caused by learning their own incorrect pseudo-labels. In this process, we progressively introduce more trustworthy pseudo-labels to be involved in the supervision through dynamic threshold adjustment with an adaptive noise filtering strategy. Moreover, we believe that every pixel, even discarded from supervision due to its unreliability, is important for WSSS. Thus, we develop consistency regularization on these discarded regions, providing supervision of every pixel. Experiment results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed DuPL over the recent state-of-the-art alternatives on PASCAL VOC 2012 and MS COCO datasets. Code is available at https://github.com/Wu0409/DuPL.