MarCon: Max-Margin Contrastive Learning for Imbalanced Domain Adaptation Semantic Segmentation

MarCon: Max-Margin Contrastive Learning for Imbalanced Domain Adaptation Semantic Segmentation

Yibo Wang, Ruikang Xu, Guangcheng Zhu, Cheng Peng, Haobo Wang, Runze Wu, Minmin Lin, Changjie Fan

Proceedings of the Thirty-Fifth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main Track. Pages 4994-5002. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2026/556

Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Semantic Segmentation (UDA-SS) has seen significant progress in recent years. Existing UDA-SS approaches mostly adopt a pseudo-labeling schema to adapt model in the target domain, but they often overlook the inherent long-tailed data distribution in segmentation. We find that such scarce tail samples can lead to representation collapse for tail classes and further hinder the quality of pseudo-labels. To address these challenges, we propose MarCon, a framework that mitigates the long-tailed problem from both feature representation and pseudo-labeling perspectives. Specifically, to explicitly learn a Maximum-Margin Distribution, we derive a reformulated pixel-level contrastive learning objective by modeling feature distributions with the von Mises-Fisher (vMF) distribution. It enforces strict margins to enhance intra-class compactness and inter-class separability, preventing tail classes from being overwhelmed by head classes. Furthermore, to mitigate label noise, we introduce a Reliability-aware Filter (RaF) based on the vMF-derived metrics, which performs adaptive class-wise pixel reliability assessment to identify unreliable pixels and attenuate their contribution to model training, thereby mitigating confirmation bias. Extensive experiments on GTA → Cityscapes and SYNTHIA → Cityscapes demonstrate that MarCon consistently outperforms current leading methods across various transformer-based architectures.
Keywords:
Machine Learning: Weakly supervised learning