Improve Cross-domain Mixed Sampling with Guidance Training for Adaptive Segmentation
This work addresses the challenge of costly pixel-level annotations in domain adaptive semantic segmentation, offering an incremental improvement for researchers and practitioners in computer vision.
The paper tackles the problem of domain gaps in unsupervised domain adaptation for semantic segmentation by proposing Guidance Training, which improves cross-domain mixed sampling techniques to better align with real-world target distributions, resulting in consistent performance gains when integrated with existing methods.
Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) endeavors to adjust models trained on a source domain to perform well on a target domain without requiring additional annotations. In the context of domain adaptive semantic segmentation, which tackles UDA for dense prediction, the goal is to circumvent the need for costly pixel-level annotations. Typically, various prevailing methods baseline rely on constructing intermediate domains via cross-domain mixed sampling techniques to mitigate the performance decline caused by domain gaps. However, such approaches generate synthetic data that diverge from real-world distributions, potentially leading the model astray from the true target distribution. To address this challenge, we propose a novel auxiliary task called Guidance Training. This task facilitates the effective utilization of cross-domain mixed sampling techniques while mitigating distribution shifts from the real world. Specifically, Guidance Training guides the model to extract and reconstruct the target-domain feature distribution from mixed data, followed by decoding the reconstructed target-domain features to make pseudo-label predictions. Importantly, integrating Guidance Training incurs minimal training overhead and imposes no additional inference burden. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach by integrating it with existing methods, consistently improving performance. The implementation will be available at https://github.com/Wenlve-Zhou/Guidance-Training.