# Joint Distribution Alignment via Adversarial Learning for Domain Adaptive Object Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.09033 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.09033/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 36 of its 56 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Sep 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 36)

- [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)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [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)
- [Fast R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.08083/) (2015)
- [YOLOv3: An Incremental Improvement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02767/) (2018)
- [Rich feature hierarchies for accurate object detection and semantic segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.2524/) (2013)
- [Unsupervised Domain Adaptation by Backpropagation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.7495/) (2014)
- [YOLO9000: Better, Faster, Stronger](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.08242/) (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)
- [Spatial Pyramid Pooling in Deep Convolutional Networks for Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.4729/) (2014)
- [Domain Adaptive Faster R-CNN for Object Detection in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.03243/) (2018)
- [R-FCN: Object Detection via Region-based Fully Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.06409/) (2016)
- [Semantic Foggy Scene Understanding with Synthetic Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.07819/) (2017)
- [Unsupervised Domain Adaptation with Residual Transfer Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.04433/) (2016)
- [Unsupervised Pixel-Level Domain Adaptation with Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.05424/) (2016)
- [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)
- [Simultaneous Deep Transfer Across Domains and Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1510.02192/) (2015)
- [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)
- [Single-Shot Refinement Neural Network for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.06897/) (2017)
- [Diversify and Match: A Domain Adaptive Representation Learning Paradigm for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.05396/) (2019)
- [Domain-Symmetric Networks for Adversarial Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.04663/) (2019)
- [Multi-adversarial Faster-RCNN for Unrestricted Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.10343/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [Bi3D: Bi-domain Active Learning for Cross-domain 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05886/) (2023)
- [UADA3D: Unsupervised Adversarial Domain Adaptation for 3D Object Detection with Sparse LiDAR and Large Domain Gaps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17633/) (2024)
- [Learning Cross-Image Object Semantic Relation in Transformer for Few-Shot Fine-Grained Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.00784/) (2022)
- [Fast Adversarial Training with Noise Augmentation: A Unified Perspective on RandStart and GradAlign](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.05488/) (2022)
- [Fast Quantum Convolutional Neural Networks for Low-Complexity Object Detection in Autonomous Driving Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.01370/) (2023)
- [ST-DAI: Single-shot 2.5D Spatial Transcriptomics with Intra-Sample Domain Adaptive Imputation for Cost-efficient 3D Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.21516/) (2025)
- [Source-free Semantic Regularization Learning for Semi-supervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.01126/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Unsupervised domain adaptive object detection aims to adapt a well-trained detector from its original source domain with rich labeled data to a new target domain with unlabeled data. Recently, mainstream approaches perform this task through adversarial learning, yet still suffer from two limitations. First, they mainly align marginal distribution by unsupervised cross-domain feature matching, and ignore each feature's categorical and positional information that can be exploited for conditional alignment; Second, they treat all classes as equally important for transferring cross-domain knowledge and ignore that different classes usually have different transferability. In this paper, we propose a joint adaptive detection framework (JADF) to address the above challenges. First, an end-to-end joint adversarial adaptation framework for object detection is proposed, which aligns both marginal and conditional distributions between domains without introducing any extra hyperparameter. Next, to consider the transferability of each object class, a metric for class-wise transferability assessment is proposed, which is incorporated into the JADF objective for domain adaptation. Further, an extended study from unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) to unsupervised few-shot domain adaptation (UFDA) is conducted, where only a few unlabeled training images are available in unlabeled target domain. Extensive experiments validate that JADF is effective in both the UDA and UFDA settings, achieving significant performance gains over existing state-of-the-art cross-domain detection methods.