# LangDA: Building Context-Awareness via Language for Domain Adaptive Semantic Segmentation Source: [LangDA: Building Context-Awareness via Language for Domain Adaptive Semantic Segmentation]() Collection index: [llms.txt]() Data updated: 2025-10-28T13:57:14.564Z Authors: Chang Liu, Bavesh Balaji, Saad Hossain, C Thomas, Kwei-Herng Lai, Raviteja Vemulapalli, Alexander Wong, Sirisha Rambhatla Published: 2025-03-17T03:33:28.000Z ## Abstract Unsupervised domain adaptation for semantic segmentation (DASS) aims to transfer knowledge from a label-rich source domain to a target domain with no labels. Two key approaches in DASS are (1) vision-only approaches using masking or multi-resolution crops, and (2) language-based approaches that use generic class-wise prompts informed by target domain (e.g. "a {snowy} photo of a {class}"). However, the former is susceptible to noisy pseudo-labels that are biased to the source domain. The latter does not fully capture the intricate spatial relationships of objects -- key for dense prediction tasks. To this end, we propose LangDA. LangDA addresses these challenges by, first, learning contextual relationships between objects via VLM-generated scene descriptions (e.g. "a pedestrian is on the sidewalk, and the street is lined with buildings."). Second, LangDA aligns the entire image features with text representation of this context-aware scene caption and learns generalized representations via text. With this, LangDA sets the new state-of-the-art across three DASS benchmarks, outperforming existing methods by 2.6%, 1.4% and 3.9%. ## 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]() [PDF]()