# MC-PanDA: Mask Confidence for Panoptic Domain Adaptation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.14110 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.14110/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 51 of its 70 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Jul 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 51)

- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [The Cityscapes Dataset for Semantic Urban Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.01685/) (2016)
- [Deformable DETR: Deformable Transformers for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04159/) (2020)
- [SSD: Single Shot MultiBox Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.02325/) (2015)
- [SegFormer: Simple and Efficient Design for Semantic Segmentation with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.15203/) (2021)
- [Masked-attention Mask Transformer for Universal Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01527/) (2021)
- [Unsupervised Domain Adaptation by Backpropagation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.7495/) (2014)
- [Deep CORAL: Correlation Alignment for Deep Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.01719/) (2016)
- [Per-Pixel Classification is Not All You Need for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.06278/) (2021)
- [Virtual Adversarial Training: A Regularization Method for Supervised and Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.03976/) (2017)
- [Playing for Data: Ground Truth from Computer Games](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.02192/) (2016)
- [Panoptic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.00868/) (2018)
- [Domain Generalization: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.02503/) (2021)
- [Panoptic Feature Pyramid Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.02446/) (2019)
- [ADVENT: Adversarial Entropy Minimization for Domain Adaptation in Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.12833/) (2018)
- [PointRend: Image Segmentation as Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.08193/) (2019)
- [Semantic Foggy Scene Understanding with Synthetic Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.07819/) (2017)
- [Panoptic-DeepLab](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.04751/) (2019)
- [Mask DINO: Towards A Unified Transformer-based Framework for Object Detection and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.02777/) (2022)
- [DAFormer: Improving Network Architectures and Training Strategies for Domain-Adaptive Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14887/) (2021)
- [Understanding image representations by measuring their equivariance and equivalence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.5908/) (2014)
- [DACS: Domain Adaptation via Cross-domain Mixed Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.08702/) (2020)
- [Rectifying Pseudo Label Learning via Uncertainty Estimation for Domain Adaptive Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.03773/) (2020)
- [ClassMix: Segmentation-Based Data Augmentation for Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.07936/) (2020)
- [MIC: Masked Image Consistency for Context-Enhanced Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.01322/) (2022)
- [UPSNet: A Unified Panoptic Segmentation Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.03784/) (2019)

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

- [Unlocking Constraints: Source-Free Occlusion-Aware Seamless Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.21198/) (2025)
- [DEARLi: Decoupled Enhancement of Recognition and Localization for Semi-supervised Panoptic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.10118/) (2025)
- [PanDA: Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Multimodal 3D Panoptic Segmentation in Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.19379/) (2026)
- [MC-PanDA++: Simpler, Stronger, and More Robust Domain-Adaptive Panoptic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.39681/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Domain adaptive panoptic segmentation promises to resolve the long tail of corner cases in natural scene understanding. Previous state of the art addresses this problem with cross-task consistency, careful system-level optimization and heuristic improvement of teacher predictions. In contrast, we propose to build upon remarkable capability of mask transformers to estimate their own prediction uncertainty. Our method avoids noise amplification by leveraging fine-grained confidence of panoptic teacher predictions. In particular, we modulate the loss with mask-wide confidence and discourage back-propagation in pixels with uncertain teacher or confident student. Experimental evaluation on standard benchmarks reveals a substantial contribution of the proposed selection techniques. We report 47.4 PQ on Synthia to Cityscapes, which corresponds to an improvement of 6.2 percentage points over the state of the art. The source code is available at https://github.com/helen1c/MC-PanDA.