# Knowledge Transfer with Simulated Inter-Image Erasing for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.02768 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.02768/

## Key facts

- Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 60 of its 74 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Jul 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 60)

- [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)
- [Fully Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4038/) (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)
- [Random Erasing Data Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.04896/) (2017)
- [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)
- [BoxSup: Exploiting Bounding Boxes to Supervise Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.01640/) (2015)
- [Causal Intervention for Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.12547/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Seed, Expand and Constrain: Three Principles for Weakly-Supervised Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.06098/) (2016)
- [Wider or Deeper: Revisiting the ResNet Model for Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.10080/) (2016)
- [Adversarial Complementary Learning for Weakly Supervised Object Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.06962/) (2018)
- [Revisiting Dilated Convolution: A Simple Approach for Weakly- and Semi- Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.04574/) (2018)
- [Multi-class Token Transformer for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02891/) (2022)
- [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 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)
- [Learning random-walk label propagation for weakly-supervised semantic segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.00470/) (2018)
- [Box-driven Class-wise Region Masking and Filling Rate Guided Loss for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.11693/) (2019)
- [Non-Salient Region Object Mining for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14581/) (2021)
- [Self-supervised Image-specific Prototype Exploration for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02909/) (2022)
- [Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation by Pixel-to-Prototype Contrast](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07110/) (2021)
- [CIAN: Cross-Image Affinity Net for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.10842/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [Semi-supervised Semantic Segmentation with Multi-Constraint Consistency Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.17914/) (2025)
- [Uncertainty-Participation Context Consistency Learning for Semi-supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.17331/) (2024)
- [Devil is in the Uniformity: Exploring Diverse Learners within Transformer for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20174/) (2025)
- [PCA-Seg: Revisiting Cost Aggregation for Open-Vocabulary Semantic and Part Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.17520/) (2026)
- [Exact: Exploring Space-Time Perceptive Clues for Weakly Supervised Satellite Image Time Series Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.03968/) (2024)
- [Efficient Token Compression for Vision Transformer with Spatial Information Preserved](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.23455/) (2025)
- [DFEN: Dual Feature Equalization Network for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.05913/) (2025)
- [CRF Loss is How Networks Should Learn Boundaries in Weakly Supervised Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.34183/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Though adversarial erasing has prevailed in weakly supervised semantic segmentation to help activate integral object regions, existing approaches still suffer from the dilemma of under-activation and over-expansion due to the difficulty in determining when to stop erasing. In this paper, we propose a Knowledge Transfer with Simulated Inter-Image Erasing (KTSE) approach for weakly supervised semantic segmentation to alleviate the above problem. In contrast to existing erasing-based methods that remove the discriminative part for more object discovery, we propose a simulated inter-image erasing scenario to weaken the original activation by introducing extra object information. Then, object knowledge is transferred from the anchor image to the consequent less activated localization map to strengthen network localization ability. Considering the adopted bidirectional alignment will also weaken the anchor image activation if appropriate constraints are missing, we propose a self-supervised regularization module to maintain the reliable activation in discriminative regions and improve the inter-class object boundary recognition for complex images with multiple categories of objects. In addition, we resort to intra-image erasing and propose a multi-granularity alignment module to gently enlarge the object activation to boost the object knowledge transfer. Extensive experiments and ablation studies on PASCAL VOC 2012 and COCO datasets demonstrate the superiority of our proposed approach. Source codes and models are available at https://github.com/NUST-Machine-Intelligence-Laboratory/KTSE.