# Open-Set Domain Adaptation for Semantic Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.19899 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.19899/

## Key facts

- Cited by 13 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 53 of its 74 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 May 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 53)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [mixup: Beyond Empirical Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.09412/) (2017)
- [Fully Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4038/) (2014)
- [The Cityscapes Dataset for Semantic Urban Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.01685/) (2016)
- [DeepLab: Semantic Image Segmentation with Deep Convolutional Nets, Atrous Convolution, and Fully Connected CRFs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.00915/) (2016)
- [SegFormer: Simple and Efficient Design for Semantic Segmentation with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.15203/) (2021)
- [CutMix: Regularization Strategy to Train Strong Classifiers with Localizable Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.04899/) (2019)
- [Pyramid Scene Parsing Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01105/) (2016)
- [MixMatch: A Holistic Approach to Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02249/) (2019)
- [Multi-Scale Context Aggregation by Dilated Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.07122/) (2015)
- [Dual Attention Network for Scene Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.02983/) (2018)
- [Playing for Data: Ground Truth from Computer Games](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.02192/) (2016)
- [CCNet: Criss-Cross Attention for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.11721/) (2018)
- [ADVENT: Adversarial Entropy Minimization for Domain Adaptation in Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.12833/) (2018)
- [Learning to Adapt Structured Output Space for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.10349/) (2018)
- [Confidence Regularized Self-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.09822/) (2019)
- [Faster Segment Anything: Towards Lightweight SAM for Mobile Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.14289/) (2023)
- [Bidirectional Learning for Domain Adaptation of Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.10620/) (2019)
- [DAFormer: Improving Network Architectures and Training Strategies for Domain-Adaptive Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14887/) (2021)
- [Prototypical Pseudo Label Denoising and Target Structure Learning for Domain Adaptive Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.10979/) (2021)
- [ICNet for Real-Time Semantic Segmentation on High-Resolution Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.08545/) (2017)
- [Adversarial Domain Adaptation with Domain Mixup](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01805/) (2019)
- [DACS: Domain Adaptation via Cross-domain Mixed Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.08702/) (2020)
- [ClassMix: Segmentation-Based Data Augmentation for Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.07936/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Intra-domain Adaptation for Semantic Segmentation through Self-Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07703/) (2020)
- [Asymmetric Non-local Neural Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07678/) (2019)
- [MIC: Masked Image Consistency for Context-Enhanced Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.01322/) (2022)
- [ParseNet: Looking Wider to See Better](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.04579/) (2015)

## Built on by (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [Versatile Incremental Learning: Towards Class and Domain-Agnostic Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.10956/) (2024)
- [Recall and Refine: A Simple but Effective Source-free Open-set Domain Adaptation Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.12558/) (2024)
- [Online Continuous Generalized Category Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.13492/) (2024)
- [FlowEO: Generative Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Earth Observation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.05140/) (2025)
- [HierDAMap: Towards Universal Domain Adaptive BEV Mapping via Hierarchical Perspective Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.06821/) (2025)
- [Universal Domain Adaptation for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.22458/) (2025)
- [Lost in Translation? Vocabulary Alignment for Source-Free Adaptation in Open-Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.15225/) (2025)
- [Seeing Beyond: Extrapolative Domain Adaptive Panoramic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.15475/) (2026)
- [Open-Set Domain Adaptation Under Background Distribution Shift: Challenges and A Provably Efficient Solution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.01152/) (2025)
- [In defense of the two-stage framework for open-set domain adaptive semantic segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.01439/) (2026)
- [Intra-Class Subdivision for Pixel Contrastive Learning: Application to Semi-supervised Cardiac Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.00174/) (2026)
- [Coarse-to-Fine Domain Incremental Learning with Attentive Distillation for Mining Footprint Segmentation in Multispectral Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.24460/) (2026)
- [DARE to Mitigate Hallucination: Dual-path Auto-Regressive-aware Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.36440/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) for semantic segmentation aims to transfer the pixel-wise knowledge from the labeled source domain to the unlabeled target domain. However, current UDA methods typically assume a shared label space between source and target, limiting their applicability in real-world scenarios where novel categories may emerge in the target domain. In this paper, we introduce Open-Set Domain Adaptation for Semantic Segmentation (OSDA-SS) for the first time, where the target domain includes unknown classes. We identify two major problems in the OSDA-SS scenario as follows: 1) the existing UDA methods struggle to predict the exact boundary of the unknown classes, and 2) they fail to accurately predict the shape of the unknown classes. To address these issues, we propose Boundary and Unknown Shape-Aware open-set domain adaptation, coined BUS. Our BUS can accurately discern the boundaries between known and unknown classes in a contrastive manner using a novel dilation-erosion-based contrastive loss. In addition, we propose OpenReMix, a new domain mixing augmentation method that guides our model to effectively learn domain and size-invariant features for improving the shape detection of the known and unknown classes. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that our proposed BUS effectively detects unknown classes in the challenging OSDA-SS scenario compared to the previous methods by a large margin. The code is available at https://github.com/KHU-AGI/BUS.