Automatic Discovery and Assessment of Interpretable Systematic Errors in Semantic Segmentation

This paper presents a novel method for discovering systematic errors in segmentation models. For instance, a systematic error in the segmentation model can be a sufficiently large number of misclassifications from the model as a parking meter for a target class of pedestrians. With the rapid deployment of these models in critical applications such as autonomous driving, it is vital to detect and interpret these systematic errors. However, the key challenge is automatically discovering such failures on unlabelled data and forming interpretable semantic sub-groups for intervention. For this, we leverage multimodal foundation models to retrieve errors and use conceptual linkage along with erroneous nature to study the systematic nature of these errors. We demonstrate that such errors are present in SOTA segmentation models (UperNet ConvNeXt and UperNet Swin) trained on the Berkeley Deep Drive and benchmark the approach qualitatively and quantitatively, showing its effectiveness by discovering coherent systematic errors for these models. Our work opens up the avenue to model analysis and intervention that have so far been underexplored in semantic segmentation.

Domain Adaptation of Synthetic Driving Datasets for Real-World Autonomous Driving

While developing perception based deep learning models, the benefit of synthetic data is enormous. However, performance of networks trained with synthetic data for certain computer vision tasks degrade significantly when tested on real world data due to the domain gap between them. One of the popular solutions in bridging this gap between synthetic and actual world data is to frame it as a domain adaptation task. In this paper, we propose and evaluate novel ways for the betterment of such approaches. In particular we build upon the method of UNIT-GAN. In normal GAN training for the task of domain translation, pairing of images from both the domains (viz, real and synthetic) is done randomly. We propose a novel method to efficiently incorporate semantic supervision into this pair selection, which helps in boosting the performance of the model along with improving the visual quality of such transformed images. We illustrate our empirical findings on Cityscapes \cite{cityscapes} and challenging synthetic dataset Synscapes. Though the findings are reported on the base network of UNIT-GAN, they can be easily extended to any other similar network.