# Towards Modality-agnostic Label-efficient Segmentation with Entropy-Regularized Distribution Alignment

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.16520 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.16520/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 116 of its 143 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Aug 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 116)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [PointNet: Deep Learning on Point Sets for 3D Classification and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00593/) (2016)
- [Bootstrap your own latent: A new approach to self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07733/) (2020)
- [The Cityscapes Dataset for Semantic Urban Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.01685/) (2016)
- [PointNet++: Deep Hierarchical Feature Learning on Point Sets in a Metric Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02413/) (2017)
- [Encoder-Decoder with Atrous Separable Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.02611/) (2018)
- [ScanNet: Richly-annotated 3D Reconstructions of Indoor Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.04405/) (2017)
- [Prototypical Networks for Few-shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.05175/) (2017)
- [ShapeNet: An Information-Rich 3D Model Repository](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03012/) (2015)
- [CutMix: Regularization Strategy to Train Strong Classifiers with Localizable Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.04899/) (2019)
- [Unsupervised Learning of Visual Features by Contrasting Cluster Assignments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09882/) (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)
- [Dynamic Graph CNN for Learning on Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07829/) (2018)
- [FixMatch: Simplifying Semi-Supervised Learning with Consistency and Confidence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.07685/) (2020)
- [Improved Regularization of Convolutional Neural Networks with Cutout](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.04552/) (2017)
- [Point Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.00931/) (2020)
- [MixMatch: A Holistic Approach to Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02249/) (2019)
- [Big Self-Supervised Models are Strong Semi-Supervised Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.10029/) (2020)
- [Self-training with Noisy Student improves ImageNet classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.04252/) (2019)
- [4D Spatio-Temporal ConvNets: Minkowski Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08755/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [On Geometry-Enhanced Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning for 3D Scene Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.22444/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Label-efficient segmentation aims to perform effective segmentation on input data using only sparse and limited ground-truth labels for training. This topic is widely studied in 3D point cloud segmentation due to the difficulty of annotating point clouds densely, while it is also essential for cost-effective segmentation on 2D images. Until recently, pseudo-labels have been widely employed to facilitate training with limited ground-truth labels, and promising progress has been witnessed in both the 2D and 3D segmentation. However, existing pseudo-labeling approaches could suffer heavily from the noises and variations in unlabelled data, which would result in significant discrepancies between generated pseudo-labels and current model predictions during training. We analyze that this can further confuse and affect the model learning process, which shows to be a shared problem in label-efficient learning across both 2D and 3D modalities. To address this issue, we propose a novel learning strategy to regularize the pseudo-labels generated for training, thus effectively narrowing the gaps between pseudo-labels and model predictions. More specifically, our method introduces an Entropy Regularization loss and a Distribution Alignment loss for label-efficient learning, resulting in an ERDA learning strategy. Interestingly, by using KL distance to formulate the distribution alignment loss, ERDA reduces to a deceptively simple cross-entropy-based loss which optimizes both the pseudo-label generation module and the segmentation model simultaneously. In addition, we innovate in the pseudo-label generation to make our ERDA consistently effective across both 2D and 3D data modalities for segmentation. Enjoying simplicity and more modality-agnostic pseudo-label generation, our method has shown outstanding performance in fully utilizing all unlabeled data points for training across ...