# AFRDA: Attentive Feature Refinement for Domain Adaptive Semantic Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.17957 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.17957/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 26 of its 30 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Jul 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 26 of 26)

- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01507/) (2017)
- [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)
- [CBAM: Convolutional Block Attention Module](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.06521/) (2018)
- [Deep High-Resolution Representation Learning for Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07919/) (2019)
- [Playing for Data: Ground Truth from Computer Games](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.02192/) (2016)
- [ADVENT: Adversarial Entropy Minimization for Domain Adaptation in Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.12833/) (2018)
- [Learning to Adapt Structured Output Space for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.10349/) (2018)
- [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)
- [Sliced Wasserstein Discrepancy for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.04064/) (2019)
- [DACS: Domain Adaptation via Cross-domain Mixed Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.08702/) (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)
- [Gated-SCNN: Gated Shape CNNs for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.05740/) (2019)
- [HRDA: Context-Aware High-Resolution Domain-Adaptive Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.13132/) (2022)
- [Rethinking BiSeNet For Real-time Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13188/) (2021)
- [GANav: Efficient Terrain Segmentation for Robot Navigation in Unstructured Outdoor Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.04233/) (2021)
- [Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Semantic Segmentation with Pseudo Label Self-Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.16979/) (2023)
- [TNS: Terrain Traversability Mapping and Navigation System for Autonomous Excavators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.06250/) (2021)
- [IDA: Informed Domain Adaptive Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.02741/) (2023)
- [Uncertainty-Aware Pseudo-Label Filtering for Source-Free Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11256/) (2024)
- [SALON: Self-supervised Adaptive Learning for Off-road Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.07826/) (2024)
- [POVNav: A Pareto-Optimal Mapless Visual Navigator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.14065/) (2023)
- [Pseudolabel guided pixels contrast for domain adaptive semantic segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.09040/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Breaking the Resource Wall: Geometry-Guided Sequence Modeling for Efficient Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.23399/) (2026)
- [Seeing Where to Deploy: Metric RGB-Based Traversability Analysis for Aerial-to-Ground Hidden Space Inspection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.14639/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In Unsupervised Domain Adaptive Semantic Segmentation (UDA-SS), a model is trained on labeled source domain data (e.g., synthetic images) and adapted to an unlabeled target domain (e.g., real-world images) without access to target annotations. Existing UDA-SS methods often struggle to balance fine-grained local details with global contextual information, leading to segmentation errors in complex regions. To address this, we introduce the Adaptive Feature Refinement (AFR) module, which enhances segmentation accuracy by refining highresolution features using semantic priors from low-resolution logits. AFR also integrates high-frequency components, which capture fine-grained structures and provide crucial boundary information, improving object delineation. Additionally, AFR adaptively balances local and global information through uncertaintydriven attention, reducing misclassifications. Its lightweight design allows seamless integration into HRDA-based UDA methods, leading to state-of-the-art segmentation performance. Our approach improves existing UDA-SS methods by 1.05% mIoU on GTA V --> Cityscapes and 1.04% mIoU on Synthia-->Cityscapes. The implementation of our framework is available at: https://github.com/Masrur02/AFRDA