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

arXiv:2609.00898v1 Announce Type: cross 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.