# On the Influence of Shape, Texture and Color for Learning Semantic Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.14878 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.14878/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 81 of its 146 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Oct 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 81)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [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)
- [HotpotQA: A Dataset for Diverse, Explainable Multi-hop Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.09600/) (2018)
- [Encoder-Decoder with Atrous Separable Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.02611/) (2018)
- [SegFormer: Simple and Efficient Design for Semantic Segmentation with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.15203/) (2021)
- [Exploring Simple Siamese Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10566/) (2020)
- [CARLA: An Open Urban Driving Simulator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.03938/) (2017)
- [Informer: Beyond Efficient Transformer for Long Sequence Time-Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.07436/) (2020)
- [Rethinking Atrous Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.05587/) (2017)
- [A Time Series is Worth 64 Words: Long-term Forecasting with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.14730/) (2022)
- [Arbitrary Style Transfer in Real-time with Adaptive Instance Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06868/) (2017)
- [MS MARCO: A Human Generated MAchine Reading COmprehension Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.09268/) (2016)
- [ImageNet-trained CNNs are biased towards texture; increasing shape bias improves accuracy and robustness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.12231/) (2018)
- [Interleaving Retrieval with Chain-of-Thought Reasoning for Knowledge-Intensive Multi-Step Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10509/) (2022)
- [MuSiQue: Multihop Questions via Single-hop Question Composition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.00573/) (2021)
- [Did Aristotle Use a Laptop? A Question Answering Benchmark with Implicit Reasoning Strategies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.02235/) (2021)
- [Enabling Large Language Models to Generate Text with Citations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14627/) (2023)
- [Holistically-Nested Edge Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.06375/) (2015)
- [TS2Vec: Towards Universal Representation of Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.10466/) (2021)
- [A Transformer-based Framework for Multivariate Time Series Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02803/) (2020)
- [Intriguing Properties of Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.10497/) (2021)
- [The UCR Time Series Archive](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.07758/) (2018)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent research has investigated the shape and texture biases of pre-trained deep neural networks (DNNs) in image classification. Those works test how much a trained DNN relies on specific image cues like texture. The present study shifts the focus to understanding the cue influence during training, analyzing what DNNs can learn from shape, texture, and color cues in absence of the others; investigating their individual and combined influence on the learning success. We analyze these cue influences at multiple levels by decomposing datasets into cue-specific versions. Addressing semantic segmentation, we learn the given task from these reduced cue datasets, creating cue experts. Early fusion of cues is performed by constructing appropriate datasets. This is complemented by a late fusion of experts which allows us to study cue influence location-dependent on pixel level. Experiments on Cityscapes, PASCAL Context, and a synthetic CARLA dataset show that while no single cue dominates, the shape + color expert predominantly improves the prediction of small objects and border pixels. The cue performance order is consistent for the tested convolutional and transformer architecture, indicating similar cue extraction capabilities, although pre-trained transformers are said to be more biased towards shape than convolutional neural networks.