# Instance Relation Graph Guided Source-Free Domain Adaptive Object Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.15793 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15793/

## Key facts

- Cited by 55 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 68 of its 85 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Mar 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 68)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Semi-Supervised Classification with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.02907/) (2016)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Domain-Adversarial Training of Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.07818/) (2015)
- [Supervised Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.11362/) (2020)
- [FixMatch: Simplifying Semi-Supervised Learning with Consistency and Confidence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.07685/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Feature Learning via Non-Parametric Instance-level Discrimination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.01978/) (2018)
- [Simplifying Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.07153/) (2019)
- [Big Self-Supervised Models are Strong Semi-Supervised Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.10029/) (2020)
- [Adversarial Discriminative Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.05464/) (2017)
- [BDD100K: A Diverse Driving Dataset for Heterogeneous Multitask Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.04687/) (2018)
- [CyCADA: Cycle-Consistent Adversarial Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.03213/) (2017)
- [Weisfeiler and Leman Go Neural: Higher-order Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.02244/) (2018)
- [Do We Really Need to Access the Source Data? Source Hypothesis Transfer for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.08546/) (2020)
- [Maximum Classifier Discrepancy for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.02560/) (2017)
- [CenterNet: Keypoint Triplets for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08189/) (2019)
- [Object Detection in 20 Years: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.05055/) (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)
- [Deep Learning on Graphs: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04202/) (2018)
- [Deep Learning for Generic Object Detection: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.02165/) (2018)
- [Unbiased Teacher for Semi-Supervised Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09480/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 55)

- [A Comprehensive Survey on Test-Time Adaptation under Distribution Shifts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15361/) (2023)
- [A Comprehensive Survey on Source-free Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.11803/) (2023)
- [Towards Online Domain Adaptive Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.05289/) (2022)
- [ConfMix: Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Object Detection via Confidence-based Mixing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11539/) (2022)
- [Adversarial Alignment for Source Free Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.04265/) (2023)
- [Periodically Exchange Teacher-Student for Source-Free Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.13930/) (2023)
- [PointSAM: Pointly-Supervised Segment Anything Model for Remote Sensing Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.13401/) (2024)
- [Mask-free OVIS: Open-Vocabulary Instance Segmentation without Manual Mask Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16891/) (2023)
- [Simplifying Source-Free Domain Adaptation for Object Detection: Effective Self-Training Strategies and Performance Insights](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.07586/) (2024)
- [Enhancing Source-Free Domain Adaptive Object Detection with Low-confidence Pseudo Label Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.13524/) (2024)
- [Spatio-Temporal Pixel-Level Contrastive Learning-based Source-Free Domain Adaptation for Video Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14361/) (2023)
- [Dynamic Retraining-Updating Mean Teacher for Source-Free Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.16497/) (2024)
- [Towards Source-free Domain Adaptive Semantic Segmentation via Importance-aware and Prototype-contrast Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.01598/) (2023)
- [PosSAM: Panoptic Open-vocabulary Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.09620/) (2024)
- [Source-Free Domain Adaptation for YOLO Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.16538/) (2024)
- [Source-free Domain Adaptive Object Detection in Remote Sensing Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.17916/) (2024)
- [DA-Ada: Learning Domain-Aware Adapter for Domain Adaptive Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.09004/) (2024)
- [Rank and Align: Towards Effective Source-free Graph Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.12185/) (2024)
- [Uncertainty-Aware Source-Free Adaptive Image Super-Resolution with Wavelet Augmentation Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17783/) (2023)
- [Continual Test-Time Adaptation for Object Detection with Adaptive Monitoring and Randomized Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.16439/) (2024)
- [Open-Set Automatic Target Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.05883/) (2022)
- [Detect, Augment, Compose, and Adapt: Four Steps for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation in Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.15353/) (2023)
- [CLIP-Guided Source-Free Object Detection in Aerial Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.05168/) (2024)
- [We're Not Using Videos Effectively: An Updated Domain Adaptive Video Segmentation Baseline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.00868/) (2024)
- [DODA: Adapting Object Detectors to Dynamic Agricultural Environments in Real-Time with Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.18334/) (2024)
- [DALI: Domain Adaptive LiDAR Object Detection via Distribution-level and Instance-level Pseudo Label Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.08806/) (2024)
- [UPRE: Zero-Shot Domain Adaptation for Object Detection via Unified Prompt and Representation Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.00721/) (2025)
- [Source-Free Object Detection with Detection Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.11090/) (2025)
- [Test-Time Adaptive Object Detection with Foundation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.25175/) (2025)
- [Embodied Domain Adaptation for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.21860/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) is an effective approach to tackle the issue of domain shift. Specifically, UDA methods try to align the source and target representations to improve the generalization on the target domain. Further, UDA methods work under the assumption that the source data is accessible during the adaptation process. However, in real-world scenarios, the labelled source data is often restricted due to privacy regulations, data transmission constraints, or proprietary data concerns. The Source-Free Domain Adaptation (SFDA) setting aims to alleviate these concerns by adapting a source-trained model for the target domain without requiring access to the source data. In this paper, we explore the SFDA setting for the task of adaptive object detection. To this end, we propose a novel training strategy for adapting a source-trained object detector to the target domain without source data. More precisely, we design a novel contrastive loss to enhance the target representations by exploiting the objects relations for a given target domain input. These object instance relations are modelled using an Instance Relation Graph (IRG) network, which are then used to guide the contrastive representation learning. In addition, we utilize a student-teacher based knowledge distillation strategy to avoid overfitting to the noisy pseudo-labels generated by the source-trained model. Extensive experiments on multiple object detection benchmark datasets show that the proposed approach is able to efficiently adapt source-trained object detectors to the target domain, outperforming previous state-of-the-art domain adaptive detection methods. Code and models are provided in hrefhttps://viudomain.github.io/irg-sfda-web/https://viudomain.github.io/irg-sfda-web/.