# Prototype-Based Pseudo-Label Denoising for Source-Free Domain Adaptation in Remote Sensing Semantic Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.16942 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.16942/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 15 of its 16 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Sep 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [Fully Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4038/) (2014)
- [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)
- [Rethinking Semantic Segmentation from a Sequence-to-Sequence Perspective with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15840/) (2020)
- [DAFormer: Improving Network Architectures and Training Strategies for Domain-Adaptive Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14887/) (2021)
- [DACS: Domain Adaptation via Cross-domain Mixed Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.08702/) (2020)
- [Source-Free Domain Adaptation for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.16372/) (2021)
- [Unsupervised Domain Adaptation in Semantic Segmentation: a Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.10876/) (2020)
- [Generalize then Adapt: Source-Free Domain Adaptive Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.11249/) (2021)
- [Source-Free Domain Adaptive Fundus Image Segmentation with Denoised Pseudo-Labeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.09735/) (2021)
- [Domain Adaptive Semantic Segmentation without Source Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.06484/) (2021)
- [Towards Source-free Domain Adaptive Semantic Segmentation via Importance-aware and Prototype-contrast Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.01598/) (2023)
- [Integrating Multiple Sources Knowledge for Class Asymmetry Domain Adaptation Segmentation of Remote Sensing Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.09893/) (2023)
- [Self-training via Metric Learning for Source-Free Domain Adaptation of Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04227/) (2022)
- [SiamSeg: Self-Training with Contrastive Learning for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation Semantic Segmentation in Remote Sensing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.13471/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Source-Free Domain Adaptation (SFDA) enables domain adaptation for semantic segmentation of Remote Sensing Images (RSIs) using only a well-trained source model and unlabeled target domain data. However, the lack of ground-truth labels in the target domain often leads to the generation of noisy pseudo-labels. Such noise impedes the effective mitigation of domain shift (DS). To address this challenge, we propose ProSFDA, a prototype-guided SFDA framework. It employs prototype-weighted pseudo-labels to facilitate reliable self-training (ST) under pseudo-labels noise. We, in addition, introduce a prototype-contrast strategy that encourages the aggregation of features belonging to the same class, enabling the model to learn discriminative target domain representations without relying on ground-truth supervision. Extensive experiments show that our approach substantially outperforms existing methods.