# Few-Shot Object Detection in Unseen Domains

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.05072 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.05072/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 42 of its 54 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Apr 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 42)

- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [Explaining and Harnessing Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6572/) (2014)
- [Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00667/) (2022)
- [FaceNet: A Unified Embedding for Face Recognition and Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03832/) (2015)
- [Supervised Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.11362/) (2020)
- [Domain Randomization for Transferring Deep Neural Networks from Simulation to the Real World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06907/) (2017)
- [ImageNet-trained CNNs are biased towards texture; increasing shape bias improves accuracy and robustness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.12231/) (2018)
- [Deep Visual Domain Adaptation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.03601/) (2018)
- [Domain Generalization via Invariant Feature Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1301.2115/) (2013)
- [Generalizing from a Few Examples: A Survey on Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05046/) (2019)
- [Domain Adaptive Faster R-CNN for Object Detection in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.03243/) (2018)
- [Sim-to-Real Transfer in Deep Reinforcement Learning for Robotics: a Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.13303/) (2020)
- [A Metric Learning Reality Check](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.08505/) (2020)
- [Frustratingly Simple Few-Shot Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.06957/) (2020)
- [Strong-Weak Distribution Alignment for Adaptive Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04798/) (2018)
- [Few-shot Object Detection via Feature Reweighting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01866/) (2018)
- [T-LESS: An RGB-D Dataset for 6D Pose Estimation of Texture-less Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.05498/) (2017)
- [Few-Shot Object Detection with Attention-RPN and Multi-Relation Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.01998/) (2019)
- [Meta R-CNN : Towards General Solver for Instance-level Few-shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.13032/) (2019)
- [Implicit 3D Orientation Learning for 6D Object Detection from RGB Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.01275/) (2019)
- [Getting to Know Low-light Images with The Exclusively Dark Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.11227/) (2018)
- [Few-Shot Object Detection and Viewpoint Estimation for Objects in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.12107/) (2020)
- [Harmonizing Transferability and Discriminability for Adapting Object Detectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.06297/) (2020)
- [Multi-Scale Positive Sample Refinement for Few-Shot Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.09384/) (2020)
- [Multi-adversarial Faster-RCNN for Unrestricted Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.10343/) (2019)
- [DeFRCN: Decoupled Faster R-CNN for Few-Shot Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.09017/) (2021)
- [Deep Visual Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.14176/) (2020)
- [se(3)-TrackNet: Data-driven 6D Pose Tracking by Calibrating Image Residuals in Synthetic Domains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.13866/) (2020)
- [RepMet: Representative-based metric learning for classification and one-shot object detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.04728/) (2018)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Few-shot object detection (FSOD) has thrived in recent years to learn novel object classes with limited data by transferring knowledge gained on abundant base classes. FSOD approaches commonly assume that both the scarcely provided examples of novel classes and test-time data belong to the same domain. However, this assumption does not hold in various industrial and robotics applications, where a model can learn novel classes from a source domain while inferring on classes from a target domain. In this work, we address the task of zero-shot domain adaptation, also known as domain generalization, for FSOD. Specifically, we assume that neither images nor labels of the novel classes in the target domain are available during training. Our approach for solving the domain gap is two-fold. First, we leverage a meta-training paradigm, where we learn the domain shift on the base classes, then transfer the domain knowledge to the novel classes. Second, we propose various data augmentations techniques on the few shots of novel classes to account for all possible domain-specific information. To constraint the network into encoding domain-agnostic class-specific representations only, a contrastive loss is proposed to maximize the mutual information between foreground proposals and class embeddings and reduce the network's bias to the background information from target domain. Our experiments on the T-LESS, PASCAL-VOC, and ExDark datasets show that the proposed approach succeeds in alleviating the domain gap considerably without utilizing labels or images of novel categories from the target domain.