# Global Aggregation then Local Distribution for Scene Parsing

Source: [Global Aggregation then Local Distribution for Scene Parsing](<https://www.sota2.com/research/paper/68fa6aaf1e209131cea29bf1>)

Collection index: [llms.txt](<https://www.sota2.com/research/llms.txt>)

Data updated: 2025-10-27T06:09:35.928Z

Authors: Xiangtai Li, Li Zhang, Guangliang Cheng, Kuiyuan Yang, Yunhai Tong, Xiatian Zhu, Tao Xiang

Published: 2021-07-28T03:46:57.000Z

## Abstract

Modelling long-range contextual relationships is critical for pixel-wise prediction tasks such as semantic segmentation. However, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are inherently limited to model such dependencies due to the naive structure in its building modules (\\eg, local convolution kernel). While recent global aggregation methods are beneficial for long-range structure information modelling, they would oversmooth and bring noise to the regions containing fine details (\\eg,~boundaries and small objects), which are very much cared for the semantic segmentation task. To alleviate this problem, we propose to explore the local context for making the aggregated long-range relationship being distributed more accurately in local regions. In particular, we design a novel local distribution module which models the affinity map between global and local relationship for each pixel adaptively. Integrating existing global aggregation modules, we show that our approach can be modularized as an end-to-end trainable block and easily plugged into existing semantic segmentation networks, giving rise to the \\emph{GALD} networks. Despite its simplicity and versatility, our approach allows us to build new state of the art on major semantic segmentation benchmarks including Cityscapes, ADE20K, Pascal Context, Camvid and COCO-stuff. Code and trained models are released at \\url{https://github.com/lxtGH/GALD-DGCNet} to foster further research.

## Recorded benchmark results

A research result applies to its stated dataset, split, metric and evaluation configuration. Compare like-for-like settings, preserve the metric's unit and direction, and distinguish paper-reported results from independent reproduction. The best result recorded here is not a claim of exhaustive, current global coverage.

## Original sources and implementation

[Original paper](<https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.13154>)

[PDF](<https://arxiv.org/pdf/2107.13154.pdf>)
