Vision-Language-Guided Pseudo-Labels for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation in Semantic Segmentation for Waste Sorting

Abstract:Obtaining labeled data for semantic segmentation in applied settings (e.g., autonomous driving, industrial waste sorting) is expensive and often infeasible at scale. We present a cross-modal pseudo-labeling pipeline that enables unsupervised domain adaptation without any target-domain annotations. The pipeline is built on two core foundation models: SAM generates class-agnostic region proposals, and EVA-CLIP assigns semantic labels based on region-text similarity, with confidence filtering ensuring that only reliable pseudo-labels are used for self-training a segmentation model. As an optional extension, BLIP provides language-grounded verification for ambiguous regions, thereby improving pseudo-label quality without altering the overall pipeline. Evaluated on two domain shifts, synthetic-to-real autonomous driving and, with a primary focus, lab-to-factory industrial waste sorting, the pipeline consistently improves over source-only baselines. Our results demonstrate that pseudo-label quality, not quantity, is a decisive factor in self-training under domain shift, and that cross-modal language grounding offers a practical path to reliable automatic annotation in deployment-critical applications.

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Machine Learning (cs.LG)

arXiv:2609.00898 [cs.CV]

(or arXiv:2609.00898v1 [cs.CV] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.00898 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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