Differential Alignment for Domain Adaptive Object Detection
Xinyu He, Xinhui Li, Xiaojie Guo
Abstract
Domain adaptive object detection (DAOD) aims to generalize an object detector trained on labeled source-domain data to a target domain without annotations, the core principle of which is source-target feature alignment. Typically, existing approaches employ adversarial learning to align the distributions of the source and target domains as a whole, barely considering the varying significance of distinct regions, say instances under different circumstances and foreground vs background areas, during feature alignment. To overcome the shortcoming, we investigate a differential feature alignment strategy. Specifically, a prediction-discrepancy feedback instance alignment module (dubbed PDFA) is designed to adaptively assign higher weights to instances of higher teacher-student detection discrepancy, effectively handling heavier domain-specific information. Additionally, an uncertainty-based foreground-oriented image alignment module (UFOA) is proposed to explicitly guide the model to focus more on regions of interest. Extensive experiments on widely-used DAOD datasets together with ablation studies are conducted to demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed method and reveal its superiority over other SOTA alternatives.
BibTeX
@article{He_Li_Guo_2025, title={Differential Alignment for Domain Adaptive Object Detection}, volume={39}, url={https://ojs.aaai.org/index.php/AAAI/article/view/33885}, DOI={10.1609/aaai.v39i16.33885}, abstractNote={Domain adaptive object detection (DAOD) aims to generalize an object detector trained on labeled source-domain data to a target domain without annotations, the core principle of which is source-target feature alignment. Typically, existing approaches employ adversarial learning to align the distributions of the source and target domains as a whole, barely considering the varying significance of distinct regions, say instances under different circumstances and foreground vs background areas, during feature alignment. To overcome the shortcoming, we investigate a differential feature alignment strategy. Specifically, a prediction-discrepancy feedback instance alignment module (dubbed PDFA) is designed to adaptively assign higher weights to instances of higher teacher-student detection discrepancy, effectively handling heavier domain-specific information. Additionally, an uncertainty-based foreground-oriented image alignment module (UFOA) is proposed to explicitly guide the model to focus more on regions of interest. Extensive experiments on widely-used DAOD datasets together with ablation studies are conducted to demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed method and reveal its superiority over other SOTA alternatives.}, number={16}, journal={Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence}, author={He, Xinyu and Li, Xinhui and Guo, Xiaojie}, year={2025}, month={Apr.}, pages={17150-17158} }