We consider the problem of unsupervised domain adaptation in semantic segmentation. A key in this campaign consists in reducing the domain shift, i.e., enforcing the data distributions of the two domains to be similar. One of the common strategies is to align the marginal distribution in the feature space through adversarial learning. However, this global alignment strategy does not consider the category-level joint distribution. A possible consequence of such global movement is that some categories which are originally well aligned between the source and target may be incorrectly mapped, thus leading to worse segmentation results in target domain. To address this problem, we introduce a category-level adversarial network, aiming to enforce local semantic consistency during the trend of global alignment. Our idea is to take a close look at the category-level joint distribution and align each class with an adaptive adversarial loss. Specifically, we reduce the weight of the adversarial loss for category-level aligned features while increasing the adversarial force for those poorly aligned. In this process, we decide how well a feature is category-level aligned between source and target by a co-training approach. In two domain adaptation tasks, i.e., GTA5 → Cityscapes and SYN-THIA → Cityscapes, we validate that the proposed method matches the state of the art in segmentation accuracy.
For unsupervised domain adaptation problems, the strategy of aligning the two domains in latent feature space through adversarial learning has achieved much progress in image classification, but usually fails in semantic segmentation tasks in which the latent representations are overcomplex. In this work, we equip the adversarial network with a "significance-aware information bottleneck (SIB)", to address the above problem. The new network structure, called SIBAN, enables a significance-aware feature purification before the adversarial adaptation, which eases the feature alignment and stabilizes the adversarial training course. In two domain adaptation tasks, i.e., GTA5 → Cityscapes and SYNTHIA → Cityscapes, we validate that the proposed method can yield leading results compared with other feature-space alternatives. Moreover, SIBAN can even match the state-of-the-art output-space methods in segmentation accuracy, while the latter are often considered to be better choices for domain adaptive segmentation task.
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