In semantic segmentation, we aim to train a pixel-level classifier to assign category labels to all pixels in an image, where labeled training images and unlabeled test images are from the same distribution and share the same label set. However, in an open world, the unlabeled test images probably contain unknown categories and have different distributions from the labeled images. Hence, in this paper, we consider a new, more realistic, and more challenging problem setting where the pixel-level classifier has to be trained with labeled images and unlabeled open-world images -- we name it open-set domain adaptation segmentation (OSDAS). In OSDAS, the trained classifier is expected to identify unknown-class pixels and classify known-class pixels well. To solve OSDAS, we first investigate which distribution that unknown-class pixels obey. Then, motivated by the goodness-of-fit test, we use statistical measurements to show how a pixel fits the distribution of an unknown class and select highly-fitted pixels to form the unknown region in each test image. Eventually, we propose an end-to-end learning framework, known-region-aware domain alignment (KRADA), to distinguish unknown classes while aligning the distributions of known classes in labeled and unlabeled open-world images. The effectiveness of KRADA has been verified on two synthetic tasks and one COVID-19 segmentation task.
Unsupervised approaches for learning representations invariant to common transformations are used quite often for object recognition. Learning invariances makes models more robust and practical to use in real-world scenarios. Since data transformations that do not change the intrinsic properties of the object cause the majority of the complexity in recognition tasks, models that are invariant to these transformations help reduce the amount of training data required. This further increases the model's efficiency and simplifies training. In this paper, we investigate the generalization of invariant representations on out-of-distribution data and try to answer the question: Do model representations invariant to some transformations in a particular seen domain also remain invariant in previously unseen domains? Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that the invariant model learns unstructured latent representations that are robust to distribution shifts, thus making invariance a desirable property for training in resource-constrained settings.
3D semantic segmentation is a critical task in many real-world applications, such as autonomous driving, robotics, and mixed reality. However, the task is extremely challenging due to ambiguities coming from the unstructured, sparse, and uncolored nature of the 3D point clouds. A possible solution is to combine the 3D information with others coming from sensors featuring a different modality, such as RGB cameras. Recent multi-modal 3D semantic segmentation networks exploit these modalities relying on two branches that process the 2D and 3D information independently, striving to maintain the strength of each modality. In this work, we first explain why this design choice is effective and then show how it can be improved to make the multi-modal semantic segmentation more robust to domain shift. Our surprisingly simple contribution achieves state-of-the-art performances on four popular multi-modal unsupervised domain adaptation benchmarks, as well as better results in a domain generalization scenario.
Domain adaptive semantic segmentation methods commonly utilize stage-wise training, consisting of a warm-up and a self-training stage. However, this popular approach still faces several challenges in each stage: for warm-up, the widely adopted adversarial training often results in limited performance gain, due to blind feature alignment; for self-training, finding proper categorical thresholds is very tricky. To alleviate these issues, we first propose to replace the adversarial training in the warm-up stage by a novel symmetric knowledge distillation module that only accesses the source domain data and makes the model domain generalizable. Surprisingly, this domain generalizable warm-up model brings substantial performance improvement, which can be further amplified via our proposed cross-domain mixture data augmentation technique. Then, for the self-training stage, we propose a threshold-free dynamic pseudo-label selection mechanism to ease the aforementioned threshold problem and make the model better adapted to the target domain. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework achieves remarkable and consistent improvements compared to the prior arts on popular benchmarks. Codes and models are available at //github.com/fy-vision/DiGA
In recent years, precision agriculture has gradually oriented farming closer to automation processes to support all the activities related to field management. Service robotics plays a predominant role in this evolution by deploying autonomous agents that can navigate fields while performing tasks without human intervention, such as monitoring, spraying, and harvesting. To execute these precise actions, mobile robots need a real-time perception system that understands their surroundings and identifies their targets in the wild. Generalizing to new crops and environmental conditions is critical for practical applications, as labeled samples are rarely available. In this paper, we investigate the problem of crop segmentation and propose a novel approach to enhance domain generalization using knowledge distillation. In the proposed framework, we transfer knowledge from an ensemble of models individually trained on source domains to a student model that can adapt to unseen target domains. To evaluate the proposed method, we present a synthetic multi-domain dataset for crop segmentation containing plants of variegate shapes and covering different terrain styles, weather conditions, and light scenarios for more than 50,000 samples. We demonstrate significant improvements in performance over state-of-the-art methods. Our approach provides a promising solution for domain generalization in crop segmentation and has the potential to enhance precision agriculture applications.
Universal domain adaptation (UniDA) aims to transfer the knowledge from a labeled source domain to an unlabeled target domain without any assumptions of the label sets, which requires distinguishing the unknown samples from the known ones in the target domain. A main challenge of UniDA is that the nonidentical label sets cause the misalignment between the two domains. Moreover, the domain discrepancy and the supervised objectives in the source domain easily lead the whole model to be biased towards the common classes and produce overconfident predictions for unknown samples. To address the above challenging problems, we propose a new uncertainty-guided UniDA framework. Firstly, we introduce an empirical estimation of the probability of a target sample belonging to the unknown class which fully exploits the distribution of the target samples in the latent space. Then, based on the estimation, we propose a novel neighbors searching scheme in a linear subspace with a $\delta$-filter to estimate the uncertainty score of a target sample and discover unknown samples. It fully utilizes the relationship between a target sample and its neighbors in the source domain to avoid the influence of domain misalignment. Secondly, this paper well balances the confidences of predictions for both known and unknown samples through an uncertainty-guided margin loss based on the confidences of discovered unknown samples, which can reduce the gap between the intra-class variances of known classes with respect to the unknown class. Finally, experiments on three public datasets demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods.
Unsupervised domain adaptation has recently emerged as an effective paradigm for generalizing deep neural networks to new target domains. However, there is still enormous potential to be tapped to reach the fully supervised performance. In this paper, we present a novel active learning strategy to assist knowledge transfer in the target domain, dubbed active domain adaptation. We start from an observation that energy-based models exhibit free energy biases when training (source) and test (target) data come from different distributions. Inspired by this inherent mechanism, we empirically reveal that a simple yet efficient energy-based sampling strategy sheds light on selecting the most valuable target samples than existing approaches requiring particular architectures or computation of the distances. Our algorithm, Energy-based Active Domain Adaptation (EADA), queries groups of targe data that incorporate both domain characteristic and instance uncertainty into every selection round. Meanwhile, by aligning the free energy of target data compact around the source domain via a regularization term, domain gap can be implicitly diminished. Through extensive experiments, we show that EADA surpasses state-of-the-art methods on well-known challenging benchmarks with substantial improvements, making it a useful option in the open world. Code is available at //github.com/BIT-DA/EADA.
In semi-supervised domain adaptation, a few labeled samples per class in the target domain guide features of the remaining target samples to aggregate around them. However, the trained model cannot produce a highly discriminative feature representation for the target domain because the training data is dominated by labeled samples from the source domain. This could lead to disconnection between the labeled and unlabeled target samples as well as misalignment between unlabeled target samples and the source domain. In this paper, we propose a novel approach called Cross-domain Adaptive Clustering to address this problem. To achieve both inter-domain and intra-domain adaptation, we first introduce an adversarial adaptive clustering loss to group features of unlabeled target data into clusters and perform cluster-wise feature alignment across the source and target domains. We further apply pseudo labeling to unlabeled samples in the target domain and retain pseudo-labels with high confidence. Pseudo labeling expands the number of ``labeled" samples in each class in the target domain, and thus produces a more robust and powerful cluster core for each class to facilitate adversarial learning. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets, including DomainNet, Office-Home and Office, demonstrate that our proposed approach achieves the state-of-the-art performance in semi-supervised domain adaptation.
Invariant approaches have been remarkably successful in tackling the problem of domain generalization, where the objective is to perform inference on data distributions different from those used in training. In our work, we investigate whether it is possible to leverage domain information from the unseen test samples themselves. We propose a domain-adaptive approach consisting of two steps: a) we first learn a discriminative domain embedding from unsupervised training examples, and b) use this domain embedding as supplementary information to build a domain-adaptive model, that takes both the input as well as its domain into account while making predictions. For unseen domains, our method simply uses few unlabelled test examples to construct the domain embedding. This enables adaptive classification on any unseen domain. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on various domain generalization benchmarks. In addition, we introduce the first real-world, large-scale domain generalization benchmark, Geo-YFCC, containing 1.1M samples over 40 training, 7 validation, and 15 test domains, orders of magnitude larger than prior work. We show that the existing approaches either do not scale to this dataset or underperform compared to the simple baseline of training a model on the union of data from all training domains. In contrast, our approach achieves a significant improvement.
Deep Convolutional Neural Networks have pushed the state-of-the art for semantic segmentation provided that a large amount of images together with pixel-wise annotations is available. Data collection is expensive and a solution to alleviate it is to use transfer learning. This reduces the amount of annotated data required for the network training but it does not get rid of this heavy processing step. We propose a method of transfer learning without annotations on the target task for datasets with redundant content and distinct pixel distributions. Our method takes advantage of the approximate content alignment of the images between two datasets when the approximation error prevents the reuse of annotation from one dataset to another. Given the annotations for only one dataset, we train a first network in a supervised manner. This network autonomously learns to generate deep data representations relevant to the semantic segmentation. Then the images in the new dataset, we train a new network to generate a deep data representation that matches the one from the first network on the previous dataset. The training consists in a regression between feature maps and does not require any annotations on the new dataset. We show that this method reaches performances similar to a classic transfer learning on the PASCAL VOC dataset with synthetic transformations.
Object detection typically assumes that training and test data are drawn from an identical distribution, which, however, does not always hold in practice. Such a distribution mismatch will lead to a significant performance drop. In this work, we aim to improve the cross-domain robustness of object detection. We tackle the domain shift on two levels: 1) the image-level shift, such as image style, illumination, etc, and 2) the instance-level shift, such as object appearance, size, etc. We build our approach based on the recent state-of-the-art Faster R-CNN model, and design two domain adaptation components, on image level and instance level, to reduce the domain discrepancy. The two domain adaptation components are based on H-divergence theory, and are implemented by learning a domain classifier in adversarial training manner. The domain classifiers on different levels are further reinforced with a consistency regularization to learn a domain-invariant region proposal network (RPN) in the Faster R-CNN model. We evaluate our newly proposed approach using multiple datasets including Cityscapes, KITTI, SIM10K, etc. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach for robust object detection in various domain shift scenarios.