Enhancing Cross-Domain Detection: Adaptive Class-Aware Contrastive Transformer

Abstract

Recently, the detection transformer has gained substantial attention for its inherent minimal post-processing requirement. However, this paradigm relies on abundant training data, yet in the context of the cross-domain adaptation, insufficient labels in the target domain exacerbate issues of class imbalance and model performance degradation. To address these challenges, we propose a novel class-aware cross domain detection transformer based on the adversarial learning and mean-teacher framework. First, considering the inconsistencies between the classification and regression tasks, we introduce an IoU-aware prediction branch and exploit the consistency of classification and location scores to filter and reweight pseudo labels. Second, we devise a dynamic category threshold refinement to adaptively manage model confidence. Third, to alleviate the class imbalance, an instance-level class-aware contrastive learning module is presented to encourage the generation of discriminative features for each class, particularly benefiting minority classes. Experimental results across diverse domain-adaptive scenarios validate our method’s effectiveness in improving performance and alleviating class imbalance issues, which outperforms the state-of-the-art transformer based methods.