# Dual form Complementary Masking for Domain-Adaptive Image Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.12008 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.12008/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 66 of its 109 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Jul 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 66)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [The Cityscapes Dataset for Semantic Urban Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.01685/) (2016)
- [SegFormer: Simple and Efficient Design for Semantic Segmentation with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.15203/) (2021)
- [BEiT: BERT Pre-Training of Image Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.08254/) (2021)
- [Arbitrary Style Transfer in Real-time with Adaptive Instance Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06868/) (2017)
- [Improved Regularization of Convolutional Neural Networks with Cutout](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.04552/) (2017)
- [SimMIM: A Simple Framework for Masked Image Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09886/) (2021)
- [iBOT: Image BERT Pre-Training with Online Tokenizer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.07832/) (2021)
- [Learning to Adapt Structured Output Space for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.10349/) (2018)
- [Masked Feature Prediction for Self-Supervised Visual Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.09133/) (2021)
- [VisDA: The Visual Domain Adaptation Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.06924/) (2017)
- [Confidence Regularized Self-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.09822/) (2019)
- [Bridging Theory and Algorithm for Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05801/) (2019)
- [Bidirectional Learning for Domain Adaptation of Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.10620/) (2019)
- [Prototypical Pseudo Label Denoising and Target Structure Learning for Domain Adaptive Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.10979/) (2021)
- [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)
- [PeCo: Perceptual Codebook for BERT Pre-training of Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.12710/) (2021)
- [MIC: Masked Image Consistency for Context-Enhanced Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.01322/) (2022)
- [Instance Adaptive Self-Training for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.12197/) (2020)
- [Category Anchor-Guided Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13049/) (2019)
- [Self-supervised Augmentation Consistency for Adapting Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.00097/) (2021)
- [Domain Adaptation for Semantic Segmentation with Maximum Squares Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.13589/) (2019)
- [CDTrans: Cross-domain Transformer for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.06165/) (2021)
- [Self-Ensembling with GAN-based Data Augmentation for Domain Adaptation in Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.00589/) (2019)
- [A Closer Look at Smoothness in Domain Adversarial Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.08213/) (2022)
- [TVT: Transferable Vision Transformer for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05988/) (2021)

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

- [Understanding and Enhancing Mask-Based Pretraining towards Universal Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.21650/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent works have correlated Masked Image Modeling (MIM) with consistency regularization in Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA). However, they merely treat masking as a special form of deformation on the input images and neglect the theoretical analysis, which leads to a superficial understanding of masked reconstruction and insufficient exploitation of its potential in enhancing feature extraction and representation learning. In this paper, we reframe masked reconstruction as a sparse signal reconstruction problem and theoretically prove that the dual form of complementary masks possesses superior capabilities in extracting domain-agnostic image features. Based on this compelling insight, we propose MaskTwins, a simple yet effective UDA framework that integrates masked reconstruction directly into the main training pipeline. MaskTwins uncovers intrinsic structural patterns that persist across disparate domains by enforcing consistency between predictions of images masked in complementary ways, enabling domain generalization in an end-to-end manner. Extensive experiments verify the superiority of MaskTwins over baseline methods in natural and biological image segmentation. These results demonstrate the significant advantages of MaskTwins in extracting domain-invariant features without the need for separate pre-training, offering a new paradigm for domain-adaptive segmentation.