Adapting In-Domain Few-Shot Segmentation to New Domains without Source Domain Retraining

Cross-domain few-shot segmentation (CD-FSS) aims to segment objects of novel classes in new domains, which is often challenging due to the diverse characteristics of target domains and the limited availability of support data. Most CD-FSS methods redesign and retrain in-domain FSS models using various domain-generalization techniques, which are effective but costly to train. To address these issues, we propose adapting informative model structures of the well-trained FSS model for target domains by learning domain characteristics from few-shot labeled support samples during inference, thereby eliminating the need for retraining. Specifically, we first adaptively identify domain-specific model structures by measuring parameter importance using a novel structure Fisher score in a data-dependent manner. Then, we progressively train the selected informative model structures with hierarchically constructed training samples, progressing from fewer to more support shots. The resulting Informative Structure Adaptation (ISA) method effectively addresses domain shifts and equips existing well-trained in-domain FSS models with flexible adaptation capabilities for new domains, eliminating the need to redesign or retrain CD-FSS models on base data. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of our method, demonstrating superior performance across multiple CD-FSS benchmarks.