# Unlocking Robust Semantic Segmentation Performance via Label-only Elastic Deformations against Implicit Label Noise

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.10383 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10383/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 27 of its 47 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Aug 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 27 of 27)

- [The Cityscapes Dataset for Semantic Urban Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.01685/) (2016)
- [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)
- [CutMix: Regularization Strategy to Train Strong Classifiers with Localizable Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.04899/) (2019)
- [Pyramid Scene Parsing Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01105/) (2016)
- [Masked-attention Mask Transformer for Universal Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01527/) (2021)
- [Improved Regularization of Convolutional Neural Networks with Cutout](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.04552/) (2017)
- [Random Erasing Data Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.04896/) (2017)
- [Dual Attention Network for Scene Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.02983/) (2018)
- [COCO-Stuff: Thing and Stuff Classes in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03716/) (2016)
- [Segmentation Transformer: Object-Contextual Representations for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.11065/) (2019)
- [Early-Learning Regularization Prevents Memorization of Noisy Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.00151/) (2020)
- [How does Disagreement Help Generalization against Label Corruption?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.04215/) (2019)
- [Training Deep Neural Networks on Noisy Labels with Bootstrapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6596/) (2014)
- [Joint Optimization Framework for Learning with Noisy Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.11364/) (2018)
- [Identifying Mislabeled Data using the Area Under the Margin Ranking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.10528/) (2020)
- [LoveDA: A Remote Sensing Land-Cover Dataset for Domain Adaptive Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.08733/) (2021)
- [Learning with Noisy Labels Revisited: A Study Using Real-World Human Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.12088/) (2021)
- [Rectifying Pseudo Label Learning via Uncertainty Estimation for Domain Adaptive Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.03773/) (2020)
- [CAT-Seg: Cost Aggregation for Open-Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11797/) (2023)
- [Asymmetric Non-local Neural Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07678/) (2019)
- [DiffuseMix: Label-Preserving Data Augmentation with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14881/) (2024)
- [Adaptive Early-Learning Correction for Segmentation from Noisy Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.03740/) (2021)
- [Semi-Supervised Semantic Image Segmentation with Self-correcting Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.07073/) (2018)
- [Global Context Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.13375/) (2020)
- [Robust Object Detection With Inaccurate Bounding Boxes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.09697/) (2022)
- [U-CE: Uncertainty-aware Cross-Entropy for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09947/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

While previous studies on image segmentation focus on handling severe (or explicit) label noise, real-world datasets also exhibit subtle (or implicit) label imperfections. These arise from inherent challenges, such as ambiguous object boundaries and annotator variability. Although not explicitly present, such mild and latent noise can still impair model performance. Typical data augmentation methods, which apply identical transformations to the image and its label, risk amplifying these subtle imperfections and limiting the model's generalization capacity. In this paper, we introduce NSegment+, a novel augmentation framework that decouples image and label transformations to address such realistic noise for semantic segmentation. By introducing controlled elastic deformations only to segmentation labels while preserving the original images, our method encourages models to focus on learning robust representations of object structures despite minor label inconsistencies. Extensive experiments demonstrate that NSegment+ consistently improves performance, achieving mIoU gains of up to +2.29, +2.38, +1.75, and +3.39 in average on Vaihingen, LoveDA, Cityscapes, and PASCAL VOC, respectively-even without bells and whistles, highlighting the importance of addressing implicit label noise. These gains can be further amplified when combined with other training tricks, including CutMix and Label Smoothing.