The disclosure provides a learning framework that unifies both semantic segmentation and semantic edge detection. A learnable recurrent message passing layer is disclosed where semantic edges are considered as explicitly learned gating signals to refine segmentation and improve dense prediction quality by finding compact structures for message paths. The disclosure includes a method for coupled segmentation and edge learning. In one example, the method includes: (1) receiving an input image, (2) generating, from the input image, a semantic feature map, an affinity map, and a semantic edge map from a single backbone network of a convolutional neural network (CNN), and (3) producing a refined semantic feature map by smoothing pixels of the semantic feature map using spatial propagation, and controlling the smoothing using both affinity values from the affinity map and edge values from the semantic edge map.