# SemiDAViL: Semi-supervised Domain Adaptation with Vision-Language Guidance for Semantic Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.06389 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.06389/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 72 of its 104 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Apr 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 72)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [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)
- [V-Net: Fully Convolutional Neural Networks for Volumetric Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.04797/) (2016)
- [Generalized Cross Entropy Loss for Training Deep Neural Networks with Noisy Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.07836/) (2018)
- [Playing for Data: Ground Truth from Computer Games](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.02192/) (2016)
- [CrossViT: Cross-Attention Multi-Scale Vision Transformer for Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14899/) (2021)
- [Language-driven Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03546/) (2022)
- [Generalised Dice overlap as a deep learning loss function for highly unbalanced segmentations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.03237/) (2017)
- [Extract Free Dense Labels from CLIP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01071/) (2021)
- [Open-Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation with Mask-adapted CLIP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.04150/) (2022)
- [Object Detection in 20 Years: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.05055/) (2019)
- [GroupViT: Semantic Segmentation Emerges from Text Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.11094/) (2022)
- [Image Segmentation Using Text and Image Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10003/) (2021)
- [Scaling Open-Vocabulary Image Segmentation with Image-Level Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.12143/) (2021)
- [Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation with Cross Pseudo Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.01226/) (2021)
- [Uncertainty-aware Self-ensembling Model for Semi-supervised 3D Left Atrium Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.07034/) (2019)
- [Semi-supervised Domain Adaptation via Minimax Entropy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.06487/) (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)
- [Vision-Language Transformer and Query Generation for Referring Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05565/) (2021)
- [DACS: Domain Adaptation via Cross-domain Mixed Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.08702/) (2020)
- [Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation Using Unreliable Pseudo-Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.03884/) (2022)
- [ClassMix: Segmentation-Based Data Augmentation for Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.07936/) (2020)
- [Revisiting Weak-to-Strong Consistency in Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.09910/) (2022)
- [MIC: Masked Image Consistency for Context-Enhanced Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.01322/) (2022)

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

- [FRIEREN: Federated Learning with Vision-Language Regularization for Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.02114/) (2025)
- [MQAdapter: Multi-Modal Quantum Adapter for Coarse-to-Fine VLM Fine-tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.12418/) (2026)
- [TC-ADA: One-Shot Active Domain Adaptation for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.33432/) (2026)
- [Improving Category-Aware Active Domain Adaptation via Uncertainty-Guided Region Coverage](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.19803/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Domain Adaptation (DA) and Semi-supervised Learning (SSL) converge in Semi-supervised Domain Adaptation (SSDA), where the objective is to transfer knowledge from a source domain to a target domain using a combination of limited labeled target samples and abundant unlabeled target data. Although intuitive, a simple amalgamation of DA and SSL is suboptimal in semantic segmentation due to two major reasons: (1) previous methods, while able to learn good segmentation boundaries, are prone to confuse classes with similar visual appearance due to limited supervision; and (2) skewed and imbalanced training data distribution preferring source representation learning whereas impeding from exploring limited information about tailed classes. Language guidance can serve as a pivotal semantic bridge, facilitating robust class discrimination and mitigating visual ambiguities by leveraging the rich semantic relationships encoded in pre-trained language models to enhance feature representations across domains. Therefore, we propose the first language-guided SSDA setting for semantic segmentation in this work. Specifically, we harness the semantic generalization capabilities inherent in vision-language models (VLMs) to establish a synergistic framework within the SSDA paradigm. To address the inherent class-imbalance challenges in long-tailed distributions, we introduce class-balanced segmentation loss formulations that effectively regularize the learning process. Through extensive experimentation across diverse domain adaptation scenarios, our approach demonstrates substantial performance improvements over contemporary state-of-the-art (SoTA) methodologies. Code is available: hrefhttps://github.com/hritam-98/SemiDAViLGitHub.
