# Uncertainty-Aware Model Adaptation for Unsupervised Cross-Domain Object Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2108.12612 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.12612/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 44 of its 56 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Aug 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 44)

- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [On Calibration of Modern Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.04599/) (2017)
- [Dropout as a Bayesian Approximation: Representing Model Uncertainty in Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02142/) (2015)
- [The Cityscapes Dataset for Semantic Urban Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.01685/) (2016)
- [Simple and Scalable Predictive Uncertainty Estimation using Deep Ensembles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01474/) (2016)
- [YOLOv3: An Incremental Improvement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02767/) (2018)
- [Unsupervised Domain Adaptation by Backpropagation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.7495/) (2014)
- [Learning Transferable Features with Deep Adaptation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.02791/) (2015)
- [Can You Trust Your Model's Uncertainty? Evaluating Predictive Uncertainty Under Dataset Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02530/) (2019)
- [Deep CORAL: Correlation Alignment for Deep Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.01719/) (2016)
- [CyCADA: Cycle-Consistent Adversarial Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.03213/) (2017)
- [Multimodal Unsupervised Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.04732/) (2018)
- [Deep Visual Domain Adaptation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.03601/) (2018)
- [Deep Domain Confusion: Maximizing for Domain Invariance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.3474/) (2014)
- [Learning to Adapt Structured Output Space for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.10349/) (2018)
- [Deep Exploration via Bootstrapped DQN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.04621/) (2016)
- [Variational Dropout and the Local Reparameterization Trick](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02557/) (2015)
- [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)
- [Soft-NMS -- Improving Object Detection With One Line of Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04503/) (2017)
- [A Survey of Unsupervised Deep Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.02849/) (2018)
- [Bidirectional Learning for Domain Adaptation of Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.10620/) (2019)
- [Probabilistic Backpropagation for Scalable Learning of Bayesian Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.05336/) (2015)
- [Strong-Weak Distribution Alignment for Adaptive Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04798/) (2018)
- [Sliced Wasserstein Discrepancy for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.04064/) (2019)
- [Driving in the Matrix: Can Virtual Worlds Replace Human-Generated Annotations for Real World Tasks?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.01983/) (2016)
- [DLOW: Domain Flow for Adaptation and Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.05418/) (2018)
- [Progressive Domain Adaptation for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.11319/) (2019)
- [Exploring Categorical Regularization for Domain Adaptive Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.09152/) (2020)

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

- [Domain Adaptive Hand Keypoint and Pixel Localization in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.08344/) (2022)
- [Domain Generalisation for Object Detection under Covariate and Concept Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05294/) (2022)
- [Tracking Passengers and Baggage Items using Multiple Overhead Cameras at Security Checkpoints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.00190/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This work tackles the unsupervised cross-domain object detection problem which aims to generalize a pre-trained object detector to a new target domain without labels. We propose an uncertainty-aware model adaptation method, which is based on two motivations: 1) the estimation and exploitation of model uncertainty in a new domain is critical for reliable domain adaptation; and 2) the joint alignment of distributions for inputs (feature alignment) and outputs (self-training) is needed. To this end, we compose a Bayesian CNN-based framework for uncertainty estimation in object detection, and propose an algorithm for generation of uncertainty-aware pseudo-labels. We also devise a scheme for joint feature alignment and self-training of the object detection model with uncertainty-aware pseudo-labels. Experiments on multiple cross-domain object detection benchmarks show that our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance.