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Title: Domain Adaptation for Structured Output via Disentangled Patch Representations

Paper content:
Predicting structured outputs such as semantic segmentation relies on expensive per-pixel annotations to learn strong supervised models like convolutional neural networks.
However, these models trained on one data domain may not generalize well to other domains unequipped with annotations for model finetuning.
To avoid the labor-intensive process of annotation, we develop a domain adaptation method to adapt the source data to the unlabeled target domain.
To this end, we propose to learn discriminative feature representations of patches based on label histograms in the source domain, through the construction of a disentangled space.
With such representations as guidance, we then use an adversarial learning scheme to push the feature representations in target patches to the closer distributions in source ones.
In addition, we show that our framework can integrate a global alignment process with the proposed patch-level alignment and achieve state-of-the-art performance on semantic segmentation.
Extensive ablation studies and experiments are conducted on numerous benchmark datasets with various settings, such as synthetic-to-real and cross-city scenarios.
Recent deep learning-based methods have made significant progress on vision tasks, such as object recognition BID17 and semantic segmentation BID19 , relying on large-scale annotations to supervise the learning process.
However, for a test domain different from the annotated training data, learned models usually do not generalize well.
In such cases, domain adaptation methods have been developed to close the gap between a source domain with annotations and a target domain without labels.
Along this line of research, numerous methods have been developed for image classification BID29 BID8 , but despite recent works on domain adaptation for pixel-level prediction tasks such as semantic segmentation BID14 , there still remains significant room for improvement.
Yet domain adaptation is a crucial need for pixel-level predictions, as the cost to annotate ground truth is prohibitively expensive.
For instance, road-scene images in different cities may have various appearance distributions, while conditions even within the same city may vary significantly over time or weather.Existing state-of-the-art methods use feature-level BID14 or output space adaptation BID31 to align the distributions between the source and target domains using adversarial learning BID11 BID37 .
These approaches usually exploit the global distribution alignment, such as spatial layout, but such global statistics may already differ significantly between two domains due to differences in camera pose or field of view.
Figure 1 illustrates one example, where two images share a similar layout, but the corresponding grids do not match well.
Such misalignment may introduce an incorrect bias during adaptation.
Instead, we consider to match patches that are more likely to be shared across domains regardless of where they are located.One way to utilize patch-level information is to align their distributions through adversarial learning.
However, this is not straightforward since patches may have high variation among each other and there is no guidance for the model to know which patch distributions are close.
Motivated by recent advances in learning disentangled representations BID18 BID24 , we adopt a similar approach by considering label histograms of patches as a factor and learn discriminative Figure 1 : Illustration of the proposed patch-level alignment against the global alignment that considers the spatial relationship between grids.
We first learn discriminative representations for source patches (solid symbols) and push a target representation (unfilled symbol) close to the distribution of source ones, regardless of where these patches are located in the image.representations for patches to relax the high-variation problem among them.
Then, we use the learned representations as a bridge to better align patches between source and target domains.Specifically, we utilize two adversarial modules to align both the global and patch-level distributions between two domains, where the global one is based on the output space adaptation BID31 , and the patch-based one is achieved through the proposed alignment by learning discriminative representations.
To guide the learning process, we first use the pixel-level annotations provided in the source domain and extract the label histogram as a patch-level representation.
We then apply K-means clustering to group extracted patch representations into K clusters, whose cluster assignments are then used as the ground truth to train a classifier shared across two domains for transferring a learned discriminative representation of patches from the source to the target domain.
Ideally, given the patches in the target domain, they would be classified into one of K categories.
However, since there is a domain gap, we further use an adversarial loss to push the feature representations of target patches close to the distribution of the source patches in this clustered space (see Figure 1 ).
Note that our representation learning can be viewed as a kind of disentanglement guided by the label histogram, but is different from existing methods that use pre-defined factors such as object pose BID18 .In
experiments, we follow the domain adaptation setting in BID14 and perform pixellevel road-scene image segmentation. We
conduct experiments under various settings, including the synthetic-to-real, i.e., GTA5 BID27 )/SYNTHIA BID28 to Cityscapes BID5 ) and cross-city, i.e., Cityscapes to Oxford RobotCar BID23 scenarios. In
addition, we provide extensive ablation studies to validate each component in the proposed framework. By
combining global and patch-level alignments, we show that our approach performs favorably against state-of-the-art methods in terms of accuracy and visual quality. We
note that the proposed framework is general and could be applicable to other forms of structured outputs such as depth, which will be studied in our future work.The contributions of this work are as follows. First
, we propose a domain adaptation framework for structured output prediction by utilizing global and patch-level adversarial learning modules. Second
, we develop a method to learn discriminative representations guided by the label histogram of patches via clustering and show that these representations help the patch-level alignment. Third
, we demonstrate that the proposed adaptation method performs favorably against various baselines and state-of-the-art methods on semantic segmentation.
In this paper, we present a domain adaptation method for structured output via a general framework that combines global and patch-level alignments.
The global alignment is achieved by the output space adaptation, while the patch-level one is performed via learning discriminative representations of patches across domains.
To learn such patch-level representations, we propose to construct a clustered space of the source patches and adopt an adversarial learning scheme to push the target patch distributions closer to the source ones.
We conduct extensive ablation study and experiments to validate the effectiveness of the proposed method under numerous challenges on semantic segmentation, including synthetic-to-real and cross-city scenarios, and show that our approach performs favorably against existing algorithms.

assistant: text: A domain adaptation method for structured output via learning patch-level discriminative feature representations