SIFR Uses Spectral Filtering to Improve Semantic Segmentation Across Unseen Domains

arXiv:2610.39926v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Domain generalized semantic segmentation is challenging because it requires accurate dense prediction on unseen domains without any access to target-domain data during training. Existing methods improve transferability through data diversification, invariant learning, or direct use of foundation models, but they often struggle to simultaneously suppress domain-sensitive interference and preserve fine-grained spatial cues. In this work, we propose SIFR, a frequency-aware dual-stream framework that tackles domain shift at both the fusion and decoding stages. SIFR uses spectral modeling as a unified principle to regulate both heterogeneous prior interaction and dense decoder refinement. Instead of directly fusing frozen CLIP and DINOv2 features, SIFR performs spectral-guided invariant fusion to filter out domain-sensitive responses while preserving complementary semantic and structural information. In addition, SIFR incorporates a spectral decoder refinement module that stabilizes multi-scale decoder features through low-frequency statistics-based normalization and adaptive frequency selection, thereby reducing the propagation of residual domain bias in dense prediction. This design enables SIFR to jointly improve domain robustness and segmentation precision under severe distribution shifts. Extensive experiments on multiple DGSS benchmarks, including synthetic-to-real, real-to-real, and adverse-weather settings, demonstrate consistent improvements over previous state-of-the-art methods.