Prompt-DAS: Annotation-Efficient Prompt Learning for Domain Adaptive Semantic Segmentation of Electron Microscopy Images

Abstract: Domain adaptive segmentation (DAS) of numerous organelle instances from large-scale electron microscopy (EM) is a promising way to enable annotation-efficient learning. Inspired by SAM, we propose a promptable multitask framework, namely Prompt-DAS, which is flexible enough to utilize any number of point prompts during the adaptation training stage and testing stage. Thus, with varying prompt configurations, Prompt-DAS can perform unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) and weakly supervised domain adaptation (WDA), as well as interactive segmentation during testing. Unlike the foundation model SAM, which necessitates a prompt for each individual object instance, Prompt-DAS is only trained on a small dataset and can utilize full points on all instances, sparse points on partial instances, or even no points at all, facilitated by the incorporation of an auxiliary center-point detection task. Moreover, a novel prompt-guided contrastive learning is proposed to enhance discriminative feature learning. Comprehensive experiments conducted on challenging benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach over existing UDA, WDA, and SAM-based approaches.