Uncertainty-Aware Pseudo Label Refinery for Domain Adaptive Semantic Segmentation

Yuxi Wang, Junran Peng, ZhaoXiang Zhang; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021, pp. 9092-9101

Unsupervised domain adaptation for semantic segmentation aims to assign the pixel-level labels for unlabeled target domain by transferring knowledge from the labeled source domain. A typical self-supervised learning approach generates pseudo labels from the source model and then re-trains the model to fit the target distribution. However, it suffers from noisy pseudo labels due to the existence of domain shift. Related works alleviate this problem by selecting high-confidence predictions, but uncertain classes with low confidence scores have rarely been considered. This informative uncertainty is essential to enhance feature representation and align source and target domains. In this paper, we propose a novel uncertainty-aware pseudo label refinery framework considering two crucial factors simultaneously. First, we progressively enhance the feature alignment model via the target-guided uncertainty rectifying framework. Second, we provide an uncertainty-aware pseudo label assignment strategy without any manually designed threshold to reduce the noisy labels. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach and achieve state-of-the-art performance on two standard synthetic-2-real tasks.