While existing unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) methods greatly enhance target domain performance in semantic segmentation, they often neglect network calibration quality, resulting in misalignment between prediction confidence and actual accuracy-a significant risk in safety-critical applications. Our key insight emerges from observing that performance degrades substantially when soft pseudo-labels replace hard pseudo-labels in cross-domain scenarios due to poor calibration, despite the theoretical equivalence of perfectly calibrated soft pseudo-labels to hard pseudo-labels. Based on this finding, we propose DA-Cal, a dedicated cross-domain calibration framework that transforms target domain calibration into soft pseudo-label optimization. DA-Cal introduces a Meta Temperature Network to generate pixel-level calibration parameters and employs bi-level optimization to establish the relationship between soft pseudo-labels and UDA supervision, while utilizing complementary domain-mixing strategies to prevent overfitting and reduce domain discrepancies. Experiments demonstrate that DA-Cal seamlessly integrates with existing self-training frameworks across multiple UDA segmentation benchmarks, significantly improving target domain calibration while delivering performance gains without inference overhead. The code will be released.

Cross-Domain Few-Shot Segmentation (CD-FSS) extends the generalization ability of Few-Shot Segmentation (FSS) beyond a single domain, enabling more practical applications. However, directly employing conventional FSS methods suffers from severe performance degradation in cross-domain settings, primarily due to feature sensitivity and support-to-query matching process sensitivity across domains. Existing methods for CD-FSS either focus on domain adaptation of features or delve into designing matching strategies for enhanced cross-domain robustness. Nonetheless, they overlook the fact that these two issues are interdependent and should be addressed jointly. In this work, we tackle these two issues within a unified framework by optimizing features in the frequency domain and enhancing the matching process in the spatial domain, working jointly to handle the deviations introduced by the domain gap. To this end, we propose a coherent Dual-Agent Optimization (DATO) framework, including a consistent mutual aggregation (CMA) and a correlation rectification strategy (CRS). In the consistent mutual aggregation module, we employ a set of agents to learn domain-invariant features across domains, and then use these features to enhance the original representations for feature adaptation. In the correlation rectification strategy, the agent-aggregated domain-invariant features serve as a bridge, transforming the support-to-query matching process into a referable feature space and reducing its domain sensitivity. Extensive experiments demonstrate the efficacy of our approach.

Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) for semantic segmentation aims to transfer knowledge from a labeled source domain to an unlabeled target domain. Despite the effectiveness of self-training techniques in UDA, they struggle to learn each class in a balanced manner due to inherent class imbalance and distribution shift in both data and label space between domains. To address this issue, we propose Balanced Learning for Domain Adaptation (BLDA), a novel approach to directly assess and alleviate class bias without requiring prior knowledge about the distribution shift. First, we identify over-predicted and under-predicted classes by analyzing the distribution of predicted logits. Subsequently, we introduce a post-hoc approach to align the logits distributions across different classes using shared anchor distributions. To further consider the network’s need to generate unbiased pseudo-labels during self-training, we estimate logits distributions online and incorporate logits correction terms into the loss function. Moreover, we leverage the resulting cumulative density as domain-shared structural knowledge to connect the source and target domains. Extensive experiments on two standard UDA semantic segmentation benchmarks demonstrate that BLDA consistently improves performance, especially for under-predicted classes, when integrated into various existing methods.

Pseudo-label learning is widely used in semantic segmentation, particularly in label-scarce scenarios such as unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) and semi-supervised learning (SSL). Despite its success, this paradigm can generate erroneous pseudo-labels, which are further amplified during training due to utilization of one-hot encoding. To address this issue, we propose ECOCSeg, a novel perspective for segmentation models that utilizes error-correcting output codes (ECOC) to create a fine-grained encoding for each class. ECOCSeg offers several advantages. First, an ECOC-based classifier is introduced, enabling model to disentangle classes into attributes and handle partial inaccurate bits, improving stability and generalization in pseudo-label learning. Second, a bit-level label denoising mechanism is developed to generate higher-quality pseudo-labels, providing adequate and robust supervision for unlabeled images. ECOCSeg can be easily integrated with existing methods and consistently demonstrates significant improvements on multiple UDA and SSL benchmarks across different segmentation architectures. Code is available at https://github.com/Woof6/ECOCSeg.