Detection transformers have recently shown promising object detection results and attracted increasing attention. However, how to develop effective domain adaptation techniques to improve its cross-domain performance remains unexplored and unclear. In this paper, we delve into this topic and empirically find that direct feature distribution alignment on the CNN backbone only brings limited improvements, as it does not guarantee domain-invariant sequence features in the transformer for prediction. To address this issue, we propose a novel Sequence Feature Alignment (SFA) method that is specially designed for the adaptation of detection transformers. Technically, SFA consists of a domain query-based feature alignment (DQFA) module and a token-wise feature alignment (TDA) module. In DQFA, a novel domain query is used to aggregate and align global context from the token sequence of both domains. DQFA reduces the domain discrepancy in global feature representations and object relations when deploying in the transformer encoder and decoder, respectively. Meanwhile, TDA aligns token features in the sequence from both domains, which reduces the domain gaps in local and instance-level feature representations in the transformer encoder and decoder, respectively. Besides, a novel bipartite matching consistency loss is proposed to enhance the feature discriminability for robust object detection. Experiments on three challenging benchmarks show that SFA outperforms state-of-the-art domain adaptive object detection methods. Code has been made available at: https://github.com/encounter1997/SFA.
We focus on the Source Free Object Detection (SFOD) problem, when source data is unavailable during adaptation, and the model must adapt to the unlabeled target domain. In medical imaging, several approaches have leveraged a semi-supervised student-teacher architecture to bridge domain discrepancy. Context imbalance in labeled training data and significant domain shifts between domains can lead to biased teacher models that produce inaccurate pseudolabels, degrading the student model's performance and causing a mode collapse. Class imbalance, particularly when one class significantly outnumbers another, leads to contextual bias. To tackle the problem of context bias and the significant performance drop of the student model in the SFOD setting, we introduce Grounded Teacher (GT) as a standard framework. In this study, we model contextual relationships using a dedicated relational context module and leverage it to mitigate inherent biases in the model. This approach enables us to apply augmentations to closely related classes, across and within domains, enhancing the performance of underrepresented classes while keeping the effect on dominant classes minimal. We further improve the quality of predictions by implementing an expert foundational branch to supervise the student model. We validate the effectiveness of our approach in mitigating context bias under the SFOD setting through experiments on three medical datasets supported by comprehensive ablation studies. All relevant resources, including preprocessed data, trained model weights, and code, are publicly available at this https://github.com/Tajamul21/Grounded_Teacher.
In object detection, unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) aims to transfer knowledge from a labeled source domain to an unlabeled target domain. However, UDA's reliance on labeled source data restricts its adaptability in privacy-related scenarios. This study focuses on source-free object detection (SFOD), which adapts a source-trained detector to an unlabeled target domain without using labeled source data. Recent advancements in self-training, particularly with the Mean Teacher (MT) framework, show promise for SFOD deployment. However, the absence of source supervision significantly compromises the stability of these approaches. We identify two primary issues, (1) uncontrollable degradation of the teacher model due to inopportune updates from the student model, and (2) the student model's tendency to replicate errors from incorrect pseudo labels, leading to it being trapped in a local optimum. Both factors contribute to a detrimental circular dependency, resulting in rapid performance degradation in recent self-training frameworks. To tackle these challenges, we propose the Dynamic Retraining-Updating (DRU) mechanism, which actively manages the student training and teacher updating processes to achieve co-evolutionary training. Additionally, we introduce Historical Student Loss to mitigate the influence of incorrect pseudo labels. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in the SFOD setting on multiple domain adaptation benchmarks, comparable to or even surpassing advanced UDA methods. The code will be released at https://github.com/lbktrinh/DRU
Source-Free domain adaptive Object Detection (SFOD) is a promising strategy for deploying trained detectors to new, unlabeled domains without accessing source data, addressing significant concerns around data privacy and efficiency. Most SFOD methods leverage a Mean-Teacher (MT) self-training paradigm relying heavily on High-confidence Pseudo Labels (HPL). However, these HPL often overlook small instances that undergo significant appearance changes with domain shifts. Additionally, HPL ignore instances with low confidence due to the scarcity of training samples, resulting in biased adaptation toward familiar instances from the source domain. To address this limitation, we introduce the Low-confidence Pseudo Label Distillation (LPLD) loss within the Mean-Teacher based SFOD framework. This novel approach is designed to leverage the proposals from Region Proposal Network (RPN), which potentially encompasses hard-to-detect objects in unfamiliar domains. Initially, we extract HPL using a standard pseudo-labeling technique and mine a set of Low-confidence Pseudo Labels (LPL) from proposals generated by RPN, leaving those that do not overlap significantly with HPL. These LPL are further refined by leveraging class-relation information and reducing the effect of inherent noise for the LPLD loss calculation. Furthermore, we use feature distance to adaptively weight the LPLD loss to focus on LPL containing a larger foreground area. Our method outperforms previous SFOD methods on four cross-domain object detection benchmarks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our LPLD loss leads to effective adaptation by reducing false negatives and facilitating the use of domain-invariant knowledge from the source model. Code is available at https://github.com/junia3/LPLD.
This paper focuses on source-free domain adaptation for object detection in computer vision. This task is challenging and of great practical interest, due to the cost of obtaining annotated data sets for every new domain. Recent research has proposed various solutions for Source-Free Object Detection (SFOD), most being variations of teacher-student architectures with diverse feature alignment, regularization and pseudo-label selection strategies. Our work investigates simpler approaches and their performance compared to more complex SFOD methods in several adaptation scenarios. We highlight the importance of batch normalization layers in the detector backbone, and show that adapting only the batch statistics is a strong baseline for SFOD. We propose a simple extension of a Mean Teacher with strong-weak augmentation in the source-free setting, Source-Free Unbiased Teacher (SF-UT), and show that it actually outperforms most of the previous SFOD methods. Additionally, we showcase that an even simpler strategy consisting in training on a fixed set of pseudo-labels can achieve similar performance to the more complex teacher-student mutual learning, while being computationally efficient and mitigating the major issue of teacher-student collapse. We conduct experiments on several adaptation tasks using benchmark driving datasets including (Foggy)Cityscapes, Sim10k and KITTI, and achieve a notable improvement of 4.7\% AP50 on Cityscapes$\rightarrow$Foggy-Cityscapes compared with the latest state-of-the-art in SFOD. Source code is available at https://github.com/EPFL-IMOS/simple-SFOD.
Source-free domain adaptation (SFDA) alleviates the domain discrepancy among data obtained from domains without accessing the data for the awareness of data privacy. However, existing conventional SFDA methods face inherent limitations in medical contexts, where medical data are typically collected from multiple institutions using various equipment. To address this problem, we propose a simple yet effective method, named Uncertainty-aware Adaptive Distillation (UAD) for the multi-source-free unsupervised domain adaptation (MSFDA) setting. UAD aims to perform well-calibrated knowledge distillation from (i) model level to deliver coordinated and reliable base model initialisation and (ii) instance level via model adaptation guided by high-quality pseudo-labels, thereby obtaining a high-performance target domain model. To verify its general applicability, we evaluate UAD on two image-based diagnosis benchmarks among two multi-centre datasets, where our method shows a significant performance gain compared with existing works. The code will be available soon.
Recent studies have used unsupervised domain adaptive object detection (UDAOD) methods to bridge the domain gap in remote sensing (RS) images. However, UDAOD methods typically assume that the source domain data can be accessed during the domain adaptation process. This setting is often impractical in the real world due to RS data privacy and transmission difficulty. To address this challenge, we propose a practical source-free object detection (SFOD) setting for RS images, which aims to perform target domain adaptation using only the source pre-trained model. We propose a new SFOD method for RS images consisting of two parts: perturbed domain generation and alignment. The proposed multilevel perturbation constructs the perturbed domain in a simple yet efficient form by perturbing the domain-variant features at the image level and feature level according to the color and style bias. The proposed multilevel alignment calculates feature and label consistency between the perturbed domain and the target domain across the teacher-student network, and introduces the distillation of feature prototype to mitigate the noise of pseudo-labels. By requiring the detector to be consistent in the perturbed domain and the target domain, the detector is forced to focus on domaininvariant features. Extensive results of three synthetic-to-real experiments and three cross-sensor experiments have validated the effectiveness of our method which does not require access to source domain RS images. Furthermore, experiments on computer vision datasets show that our method can be extended to other fields as well. Our code will be available at: https://weixliu.github.io/ .
Domain adaptation is crucial in aerial imagery, as the visual representation of these images can significantly vary based on factors such as geographic location, time, and weather conditions. Additionally, high-resolution aerial images often require substantial storage space and may not be readily accessible to the public. To address these challenges, we propose a novel Source-Free Object Detection (SFOD) method. Specifically, our approach begins with a self-training framework, which significantly enhances the performance of baseline methods. To alleviate the noisy labels in self-training, we utilize Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) to guide the generation of pseudo-labels, termed CLIP-guided Aggregation (CGA). By leveraging CLIP's zero-shot classification capability, we aggregate its scores with the original predicted bounding boxes, enabling us to obtain refined scores for the pseudo-labels. To validate the effectiveness of our method, we constructed two new datasets from different domains based on the DIOR dataset, named DIOR-C and DIOR-Cloudy. Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms other comparative algorithms. The code is available at https://github.com/Lans1ng/SFOD-RS.
Source-free object detection (SFOD) aims to adapt the source detector to unlabeled target domain data in the absence of source domain data. Most SFOD methods follow the same self-training paradigm using mean-teacher (MT) framework where the student model is guided by only one single teacher model. However, such paradigm can easily fall into a training instability problem that when the teacher model collapses uncontrollably due to the domain shift, the student model also suffers drastic performance degradation. To address this issue, we propose the Periodically Exchange Teacher-Student (PETS) method, a simple yet novel approach that introduces a multiple-teacher framework consisting of a static teacher, a dynamic teacher, and a student model. During the training phase, we periodically exchange the weights between the static teacher and the student model. Then, we update the dynamic teacher using the moving average of the student model that has already been exchanged by the static teacher. In this way, the dynamic teacher can integrate knowledge from past periods, effectively reducing error accumulation and enabling a more stable training process within the MT-based framework. Further, we develop a consensus mechanism to merge the predictions of two teacher models to provide higher-quality pseudo labels for student model. Extensive experiments on multiple SFOD benchmarks show that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance compared with other related methods, demonstrating the effectiveness and superiority of our method on SFOD task.
Source-free object detection (SFOD) aims to adapt a source-trained detector to an unlabeled target domain without access to the labeled source data. Current SFOD methods utilize a threshold-based pseudo-label approach in the adaptation phase, which is typically limited to high-confidence pseudo-labels and results in a loss of information. To address this issue, we propose a new approach to take full advantage of pseudo-labels by introducing high and low confidence thresholds. Specifically, the pseudo-labels with confidence scores above the high threshold are used conventionally, while those between the low and high thresholds are exploited using the Low-confidence Pseudo-labels Utilization (LPU) module. The LPU module consists of Proposal Soft Training (PST) and Local Spatial Contrastive Learning (LSCL). PST generates soft labels of proposals for soft training, which can mitigate the label mismatch problem. LSCL exploits the local spatial relationship of proposals to improve the model's ability to differentiate between spatially adjacent proposals, thereby optimizing representational features further. Combining the two components overcomes the challenges faced by traditional methods in utilizing low-confidence pseudo-labels. Extensive experiments on five cross-domain object detection benchmarks demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms the previous SFOD methods, achieving state-of-the-art performance.
Source-free object detection (SFOD) aims to transfer a detector pre-trained on a label-rich source domain to an unlabeled target domain without seeing source data. While most existing SFOD methods generate pseudo labels via a source-pretrained model to guide training, these pseudo labels usually contain high noises due to heavy domain discrepancy. In order to obtain better pseudo supervisions, we divide the target domain into source-similar and source-dissimilar parts and align them in the feature space by adversarial learning. Specifically, we design a detection variance-based criterion to divide the target domain. This criterion is motivated by a finding that larger detection variances denote higher recall and larger similarity to the source domain. Then we incorporate an adversarial module into a mean teacher framework to drive the feature spaces of these two subsets indistinguishable. Extensive experiments on multiple cross-domain object detection datasets demonstrate that our proposed method consistently outperforms the compared SFOD methods.
Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) is an effective approach to tackle the issue of domain shift. Specifically, UDA methods try to align the source and target representations to improve the generalization on the target domain. Further, UDA methods work under the assumption that the source data is accessible during the adaptation process. However, in real-world scenarios, the labelled source data is often restricted due to privacy regulations, data transmission constraints, or proprietary data concerns. The Source-Free Domain Adaptation (SFDA) setting aims to alleviate these concerns by adapting a source-trained model for the target domain without requiring access to the source data. In this paper, we explore the SFDA setting for the task of adaptive object detection. To this end, we propose a novel training strategy for adapting a source-trained object detector to the target domain without source data. More precisely, we design a novel contrastive loss to enhance the target representations by exploiting the objects relations for a given target domain input. These object instance relations are modelled using an Instance Relation Graph (IRG) network, which are then used to guide the contrastive representation learning. In addition, we utilize a student-teacher based knowledge distillation strategy to avoid overfitting to the noisy pseudo-labels generated by the source-trained model. Extensive experiments on multiple object detection benchmark datasets show that the proposed approach is able to efficiently adapt source-trained object detectors to the target domain, outperforming previous state-of-the-art domain adaptive detection methods. Code and models are provided in \href{https://viudomain.github.io/irg-sfda-web/}{https://viudomain.github.io/irg-sfda-web/}.
Unsupervised domain adaptation aims to align a labeled source domain and an unlabeled target domain, but it requires to access the source data which often raises concerns in data privacy, data portability and data transmission efficiency. We study unsupervised model adaptation (UMA), or called Unsupervised Domain Adaptation without Source Data, an alternative setting that aims to adapt source-trained models towards target distributions without accessing source data. To this end, we design an innovative historical contrastive learning (HCL) technique that exploits historical source hypothesis to make up for the absence of source data in UMA. HCL addresses the UMA challenge from two perspectives. First, it introduces historical contrastive instance discrimination (HCID) that learns from target samples by contrasting their embeddings which are generated by the currently adapted model and the historical models. With the historical models, HCID encourages UMA to learn instance-discriminative target representations while preserving the source hypothesis. Second, it introduces historical contrastive category discrimination (HCCD) that pseudo-labels target samples to learn category-discriminative target representations. Specifically, HCCD re-weights pseudo labels according to their prediction consistency across the current and historical models. Extensive experiments show that HCL outperforms and state-of-the-art methods consistently across a variety of visual tasks and setups.
Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) assumes that source and target domain data are freely available and usually trained together to reduce the domain gap. However, considering the data privacy and the inefficiency of data transmission, it is impractical in real scenarios. Hence, it draws our eyes to optimize the network in the target domain without accessing labeled source data. To explore this direction in object detection, for the first time, we propose a source data-free domain adaptive object detection (SFOD) framework via modeling it into a problem of learning with noisy labels. Generally, a straightforward method is to leverage the pre-trained network from the source domain to generate the pseudo labels for target domain optimization. However, it is difficult to evaluate the quality of pseudo labels since no labels are available in target domain. In this paper, self-entropy descent (SED) is a metric proposed to search an appropriate confidence threshold for reliable pseudo label generation without using any handcrafted labels. Nonetheless, completely clean labels are still unattainable. After a thorough experimental analysis, false negatives are found to dominate in the generated noisy labels. Undoubtedly, false negatives mining is helpful for performance improvement, and we ease it to false negatives simulation through data augmentation like Mosaic. Extensive experiments conducted in four representative adaptation tasks have demonstrated that the proposed framework can easily achieve state-of-the-art performance. From another view, it also reminds the UDA community that the labeled source data are not fully exploited in the existing methods.
Cross-domain object detection is challenging, because object detection model is often vulnerable to data variance, especially to the considerable domain shift between two distinctive domains. In this paper, we propose a new Unbiased Mean Teacher (UMT) model for cross-domain object detection. We reveal that there often exists a considerable model bias for the simple mean teacher (MT) model in cross-domain scenarios, and eliminate the model bias with several simple yet highly effective strategies. In particular, for the teacher model, we propose a cross-domain distillation method for MT to maximally exploit the expertise of the teacher model. Moreover, for the student model, we alleviate its bias by augmenting training samples with pixel-level adaptation. Finally, for the teaching process, we employ an out-of-distribution estimation strategy to select samples that most fit the current model to further enhance the cross-domain distillation process. By tackling the model bias issue with these strategies, our UMT model achieves mAPs of 44.1%, 58.1%, 41.7%, and 43.1% on benchmark datasets Clipart1k, Watercolor2k, Foggy Cityscapes, and Cityscapes, respectively, which outperforms the existing state-of-the-art results in notable margins. Our implementation is available at https://github.com/kinredon/umt.
The recently proposed Temporal Ensembling has achieved state-of-the-art results in several semi-supervised learning benchmarks. It maintains an exponential moving average of label predictions on each training example, and penalizes predictions that are inconsistent with this target. However, because the targets change only once per epoch, Temporal Ensembling becomes unwieldy when learning large datasets. To overcome this problem, we propose Mean Teacher, a method that averages model weights instead of label predictions. As an additional benefit, Mean Teacher improves test accuracy and enables training with fewer labels than Temporal Ensembling. Without changing the network architecture, Mean Teacher achieves an error rate of 4.35% on SVHN with 250 labels, outperforming Temporal Ensembling trained with 1000 labels. We also show that a good network architecture is crucial to performance. Combining Mean Teacher and Residual Networks, we improve the state of the art on CIFAR-10 with 4000 labels from 10.55% to 6.28%, and on ImageNet 2012 with 10% of the labels from 35.24% to 9.11%.