# Self-Supervision & Meta-Learning for One-Shot Unsupervised Cross-Domain Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.03496 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03496/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 53 of its 68 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Jun 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 53)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [Grad-CAM: Visual Explanations from Deep Networks via Gradient-based Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02391/) (2016)
- [Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning for Fast Adaptation of Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.03400/) (2017)
- [You Only Look Once: Unified, Real-Time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02640/) (2015)
- [The Cityscapes Dataset for Semantic Urban Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.01685/) (2016)
- [SSD: Single Shot MultiBox Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.02325/) (2015)
- [Prototypical Networks for Few-shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.05175/) (2017)
- [Fast R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.08083/) (2015)
- [Matching Networks for One Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.04080/) (2016)
- [Rich feature hierarchies for accurate object detection and semantic segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.2524/) (2013)
- [Unsupervised Representation Learning by Predicting Image Rotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.07728/) (2018)
- [Domain Randomization for Transferring Deep Neural Networks from Simulation to the Real World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06907/) (2017)
- [Context Encoders: Feature Learning by Inpainting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.07379/) (2016)
- [Unsupervised Learning of Visual Representations by Solving Jigsaw Puzzles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.09246/) (2016)
- [Learning Transferable Features with Deep Adaptation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.02791/) (2015)
- [Adversarial Discriminative Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.05464/) (2017)
- [Deep CORAL: Correlation Alignment for Deep Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.01719/) (2016)
- [Colorful Image Colorization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08511/) (2016)
- [CyCADA: Cycle-Consistent Adversarial Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.03213/) (2017)
- [Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning by Context Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.05192/) (2015)
- [Deeper, Broader and Artier Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.03077/) (2017)
- [Deep Transfer Learning with Joint Adaptation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.06636/) (2016)
- [Meta-Learning with Latent Embedding Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.05960/) (2018)
- [Domain Generalization by Solving Jigsaw Puzzles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.06864/) (2019)
- [Domain Adaptive Faster R-CNN for Object Detection in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.03243/) (2018)
- [Semantic Foggy Scene Understanding with Synthetic Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.07819/) (2017)
- [Strong-Weak Distribution Alignment for Adaptive Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04798/) (2018)
- [Cross-Domain Weakly-Supervised Object Detection through Progressive Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.11365/) (2018)
- [Cross-Domain Few-Shot Classification via Learned Feature-Wise Transformation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.08735/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [A Comprehensive Survey on Test-Time Adaptation under Distribution Shifts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15361/) (2023)
- [An Investigation of Test-time Adaptation for Audio Classification under Background Noise](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.15523/) (2025)
- [OSSA: Unsupervised One-Shot Style Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.00900/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Deep detection approaches are powerful in controlled conditions, but appear brittle and fail when source models are used off-the-shelf on unseen domains. Most of the existing works on domain adaptation simplify the setting and access jointly both a large source dataset and a sizable amount of target samples. However this scenario is unrealistic in many practical cases as when monitoring image feeds from social media: only a pretrained source model is available and every target image uploaded by the users belongs to a different domain not foreseen during training. We address this challenging setting by presenting an object detection algorithm able to exploit a pre-trained source model and perform unsupervised adaptation by using only one target sample seen at test time. Our multi-task architecture includes a self-supervised branch that we exploit to meta-train the whole model with single-sample cross-domain episodes, and prepare to the test condition. At deployment time the self-supervised task is iteratively solved on any incoming sample to one-shot adapt on it. We introduce a new dataset of social media image feeds and present a thorough benchmark with the most recent cross-domain detection methods showing the advantages of our approach.