Multi-Objective Optimization for Synthetic-to-Real Style Transfer

TL;DR

This paper introduces a multi-objective evolutionary approach to optimize style transfer pipelines for synthetic-to-real domain adaptation in semantic segmentation, balancing structural and stylistic fidelity efficiently.

Contribution

It formulates style transfer pipeline optimization as a sequencing problem and studies efficient metrics for rapid evaluation during evolution.

Findings

Evolutionary algorithms generate diverse, effective augmentation pipelines.

Paired-image metrics enable rapid pipeline evaluation during optimization.

Optimized pipelines improve segmentation performance on real datasets.

Abstract

Semantic segmentation networks require large amounts of pixel-level annotated data, which are costly to obtain for real-world images. Computer graphics engines can generate synthetic images alongside their ground-truth annotations. However, models trained on such images can perform poorly on real images due to the domain gap between real and synthetic images. Style transfer methods can reduce this difference by applying a realistic style to synthetic images. Choosing effective data transformations and their sequence is difficult due to the large combinatorial search space of style transfer operators. Using multi-objective genetic algorithms, we optimize pipelines to balance structural coherence and style similarity to target domains. We study the use of paired-image metrics on individual image samples during evolution to enable rapid pipeline evaluation, as opposed to standard distributional metrics that require the generation of many images. After optimization, we evaluate the resulting Pareto front using distributional metrics and segmentation performance. We apply this approach to standard datasets in synthetic-to-real domain adaptation: from the video game GTA5 to real image datasets Cityscapes and ACDC, focusing on adverse conditions. Results demonstrate that evolutionary algorithms can propose diverse augmentation pipelines adapted to different objectives. The contribution of this work is the formulation of style transfer as a sequencing problem suitable for evolutionary optimization and the study of efficient metrics that enable feasible search in this space. The source code is available at: https://github.com/echigot/MOOSS.