# Learning to Detour: Shortcut Mitigating Augmentation for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.18148 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.18148/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 38 of its 48 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 May 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 38)

- [mixup: Beyond Empirical Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.09412/) (2017)
- [Axiomatic Attribution for Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.01365/) (2017)
- [CutMix: Regularization Strategy to Train Strong Classifiers with Localizable Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.04899/) (2019)
- [Shortcut Learning in Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07780/) (2020)
- [Improved Regularization of Convolutional Neural Networks with Cutout](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.04552/) (2017)
- [COCO-Stuff: Thing and Stuff Classes in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03716/) (2016)
- [Domain Generalization with MixStyle](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02008/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Self-supervised Equivariant Attention Mechanism for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04581/) (2020)
- [What's the Point: Semantic Segmentation with Point Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02106/) (2015)
- [Weakly Supervised Learning of Instance Segmentation with Inter-pixel Relations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05044/) (2019)
- [Simple Does It: Weakly Supervised Instance and Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.07485/) (2016)
- [Object Region Mining with Adversarial Erasing: A Simple Classification to Semantic Segmentation Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.08448/) (2017)
- [Single-Stage Semantic Segmentation from Image Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.08104/) (2020)
- [FickleNet: Weakly and Semi-supervised Semantic Image Segmentation using Stochastic Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.10421/) (2019)
- [Revisiting Dilated Convolution: A Simple Approach for Weakly- and Semi- Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.04574/) (2018)
- [Anti-Adversarially Manipulated Attributions for Weakly and Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.08896/) (2021)
- [Railroad is not a Train: Saliency as Pseudo-pixel Supervision for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.08965/) (2021)
- [Learning Debiased Representation via Disentangled Feature Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.01372/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Box-driven Class-wise Region Masking and Filling Rate Guided Loss for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.11693/) (2019)
- [Self-supervised Image-specific Prototype Exploration for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02909/) (2022)
- [CIAN: Cross-Image Affinity Net for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.10842/) (2018)
- [Context Decoupling Augmentation for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.01795/) (2021)
- [Reducing Information Bottleneck for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.06530/) (2021)
- [Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation using Out-of-Distribution Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.03860/) (2022)
- [Discriminative Region Suppression for Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.07246/) (2021)
- [Threshold Matters in WSSS: Manipulating the Activation for the Robust and Accurate Segmentation Model Against Thresholds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16045/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [DIAL: Dense Image-text ALignment for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.15801/) (2024)
- [BackMix: Mitigating Shortcut Learning in Echocardiography with Minimal Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.19148/) (2024)
- [AFANet: Adaptive Frequency-Aware Network for Weakly-Supervised Few-Shot Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.17601/) (2024)
- [Right Regions, Wrong Labels: Semantic Label Flips in Segmentation under Correlation Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.13326/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Weakly supervised semantic segmentation (WSSS) employing weak forms of labels has been actively studied to alleviate the annotation cost of acquiring pixel-level labels. However, classifiers trained on biased datasets tend to exploit shortcut features and make predictions based on spurious correlations between certain backgrounds and objects, leading to a poor generalization performance. In this paper, we propose shortcut mitigating augmentation (SMA) for WSSS, which generates synthetic representations of object-background combinations not seen in the training data to reduce the use of shortcut features. Our approach disentangles the object-relevant and background features. We then shuffle and combine the disentangled representations to create synthetic features of diverse object-background combinations. SMA-trained classifier depends less on contexts and focuses more on the target object when making predictions. In addition, we analyzed the behavior of the classifier on shortcut usage after applying our augmentation using an attribution method-based metric. The proposed method achieved the improved performance of semantic segmentation result on PASCAL VOC 2012 and MS COCO 2014 datasets.