In the field of domain adaptation, a trade-off exists between the model performance and the number of target domain annotations. Active learning, maximizing model performance with few informative labeled data, comes in handy for such a scenario. In this work, we present ADeADA, a general active domain adaptation framework for semantic segmentation. To adapt the model to the target domain with minimum queried labels, we propose acquiring labels of the samples with high probability density in the target domain yet with low probability density in the source domain, complementary to the existing source domain labeled data. To further facilitate the label efficiency, we design an adaptive budget allocation policy, which dynamically balances the labeling budgets among different categories as well as between density-aware and uncertainty-based methods. Extensive experiments show that our method outperforms existing active learning and domain adaptation baselines on two benchmarks, GTA5 -> Cityscapes and SYNTHIA -> Cityscapes. With less than 5% target domain annotations, our method reaches comparable results with that of full supervision.
Unsupervised domain adaptation approaches have recently succeeded in various medical image segmentation tasks. The reported works often tackle the domain shift problem by aligning the domain-invariant features and minimizing the domain-specific discrepancies. That strategy works well when the difference between a specific domain and between different domains is slight. However, the generalization ability of these models on diverse imaging modalities remains a significant challenge. This paper introduces UDA-VAE++, an unsupervised domain adaptation framework for cardiac segmentation with a compact loss function lower bound. To estimate this new lower bound, we develop a novel Structure Mutual Information Estimation (SMIE) block with a global estimator, a local estimator, and a prior information matching estimator to maximize the mutual information between the reconstruction and segmentation tasks. Specifically, we design a novel sequential reparameterization scheme that enables information flow and variance correction from the low-resolution latent space to the high-resolution latent space. Comprehensive experiments on benchmark cardiac segmentation datasets demonstrate that our model outperforms previous state-of-the-art qualitatively and quantitatively. The code is available at //github.com/LOUEY233/Toward-Mutual-Information}{//github.com/LOUEY233/Toward-Mutual-Information
The goal of this paper is to bypass the need for labelled examples in few-shot video understanding at run time. While proven effective, in many practical video settings even labelling a few examples appears unrealistic. This is especially true as the level of details in spatio-temporal video understanding and with it, the complexity of annotations continues to increase. Rather than performing few-shot learning with a human oracle to provide a few densely labelled support videos, we propose to automatically learn to find appropriate support videos given a query. We call this self-shot learning and we outline a simple self-supervised learning method to generate an embedding space well-suited for unsupervised retrieval of relevant samples. To showcase this novel setting, we tackle, for the first time, video instance segmentation in a self-shot (and few-shot) setting, where the goal is to segment instances at the pixel-level across the spatial and temporal domains. We provide strong baseline performances that utilize a novel transformer-based model and show that self-shot learning can even surpass few-shot and can be positively combined for further performance gains. Experiments on new benchmarks show that our approach achieves strong performance, is competitive to oracle support in some settings, scales to large unlabelled video collections, and can be combined in a semi-supervised setting.
Domain adaptive semantic segmentation attempts to make satisfactory dense predictions on an unlabeled target domain by utilizing the model trained on a labeled source domain. One solution is self-training, which retrains models with target pseudo labels. Many methods tend to alleviate noisy pseudo labels, however, they ignore intrinsic connections among cross-domain pixels with similar semantic concepts. Thus, they would struggle to deal with the semantic variations across domains, leading to less discrimination and poor generalization. In this work, we propose Semantic-Guided Pixel Contrast (SePiCo), a novel one-stage adaptation framework that highlights the semantic concepts of individual pixel to promote learning of class-discriminative and class-balanced pixel embedding space across domains. Specifically, to explore proper semantic concepts, we first investigate a centroid-aware pixel contrast that employs the category centroids of the entire source domain or a single source image to guide the learning of discriminative features. Considering the possible lack of category diversity in semantic concepts, we then blaze a trail of distributional perspective to involve a sufficient quantity of instances, namely distribution-aware pixel contrast, in which we approximate the true distribution of each semantic category from the statistics of labeled source data. Moreover, such an optimization objective can derive a closed-form upper bound by implicitly involving an infinite number of (dis)similar pairs. Extensive experiments show that SePiCo not only helps stabilize training but also yields discriminative features, making significant progress in both daytime and nighttime scenarios. Most notably, SePiCo establishes excellent results on tasks of GTAV/SYNTHIA-to-Cityscapes and Cityscapes-to-Dark Zurich, improving by 12.8, 8.8, and 9.2 mIoUs compared to the previous best method, respectively.
Semantic segmentation models struggle to generalize in the presence of domain shift. In this paper, we introduce contrastive learning for feature alignment in cross-domain adaptation. We assemble both in-domain contrastive pairs and cross-domain contrastive pairs to learn discriminative features that align across domains. Based on the resulting well-aligned feature representations we introduce a label expansion approach that is able to discover samples from hard classes during the adaptation process to further boost performance. The proposed approach consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods for domain adaptation. It achieves 60.2% mIoU on the Cityscapes dataset when training on the synthetic GTA5 dataset together with unlabeled Cityscapes images.
The expensive annotation cost is notoriously known as the main constraint for the development of the point cloud semantic segmentation technique. Active learning methods endeavor to reduce such cost by selecting and labeling only a subset of the point clouds, yet previous attempts ignore the spatial-structural diversity of the selected samples, inducing the model to select clustered candidates with similar shapes in a local area while missing other representative ones in the global environment. In this paper, we propose a new 3D region-based active learning method to tackle this problem. Dubbed SSDR-AL, our method groups the original point clouds into superpoints and incrementally selects the most informative and representative ones for label acquisition. We achieve the selection mechanism via a graph reasoning network that considers both the spatial and structural diversities of superpoints. To deploy SSDR-AL in a more practical scenario, we design a noise-aware iterative labeling strategy to confront the "noisy annotation" problem introduced by the previous "dominant labeling" strategy in superpoints. Extensive experiments on two point cloud benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of SSDR-AL in the semantic segmentation task. Particularly, SSDR-AL significantly outperforms the baseline method and reduces the annotation cost by up to 63.0% and 24.0% when achieving 90% performance of fully supervised learning, respectively.
Domain adaptive object detection (DAOD) is a promising way to alleviate performance drop of detectors in new scenes. Albeit great effort made in single source domain adaptation, a more generalized task with multiple source domains remains not being well explored, due to knowledge degradation during their combination. To address this issue, we propose a novel approach, namely target-relevant knowledge preservation (TRKP), to unsupervised multi-source DAOD. Specifically, TRKP adopts the teacher-student framework, where the multi-head teacher network is built to extract knowledge from labeled source domains and guide the student network to learn detectors in unlabeled target domain. The teacher network is further equipped with an adversarial multi-source disentanglement (AMSD) module to preserve source domain-specific knowledge and simultaneously perform cross-domain alignment. Besides, a holistic target-relevant mining (HTRM) scheme is developed to re-weight the source images according to the source-target relevance. By this means, the teacher network is enforced to capture target-relevant knowledge, thus benefiting decreasing domain shift when mentoring object detection in the target domain. Extensive experiments are conducted on various widely used benchmarks with new state-of-the-art scores reported, highlighting the effectiveness.
Electroencephalography (EEG) is shown to be a valuable data source for evaluating subjects' mental states. However, the interpretation of multi-modal EEG signals is challenging, as they suffer from poor signal-to-noise-ratio, are highly subject-dependent, and are bound to the equipment and experimental setup used, (i.e. domain). This leads to machine learning models often suffer from poor generalization ability, where they perform significantly worse on real-world data than on the exploited training data. Recent research heavily focuses on cross-subject and cross-session transfer learning frameworks to reduce domain calibration efforts for EEG signals. We argue that multi-source learning via learning domain-invariant representations from multiple data-sources is a viable alternative, as the available data from different EEG data-source domains (e.g., subjects, sessions, experimental setups) grow massively. We propose an adversarial inference approach to learn data-source invariant representations in this context, enabling multi-source learning for EEG-based brain-computer interfaces. We unify EEG recordings from different source domains (i.e., emotion recognition datasets SEED, SEED-IV, DEAP, DREAMER), and demonstrate the feasibility of our invariant representation learning approach in suppressing data-source-relevant information leakage by 35% while still achieving stable EEG-based emotion classification performance.
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.