# Improving Transferability for Domain Adaptive Detection Transformers

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.14195 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.14195/

## Key facts

- Cited by 17 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 41 of its 56 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Apr 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 41)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [You Only Look Once: Unified, Real-Time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02640/) (2015)
- [Training data-efficient image transformers & distillation through attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12877/) (2020)
- [The Cityscapes Dataset for Semantic Urban Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.01685/) (2016)
- [Deformable DETR: Deformable Transformers for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04159/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Fast R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.08083/) (2015)
- [FCOS: Fully Convolutional One-Stage Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01355/) (2019)
- [DINO: DETR with Improved DeNoising Anchor Boxes for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.03605/) (2022)
- [How transferable are features in deep neural networks?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.1792/) (2014)
- [Do We Really Need to Access the Source Data? Source Hypothesis Transfer for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.08546/) (2020)
- [DAB-DETR: Dynamic Anchor Boxes are Better Queries for DETR](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12329/) (2022)
- [DN-DETR: Accelerate DETR Training by Introducing Query DeNoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01305/) (2022)
- [Optimal Transport for Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1507.00504/) (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)
- [Joint Distribution Optimal Transportation for Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.08848/) (2017)
- [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)
- [DeepJDOT: Deep Joint Distribution Optimal Transport for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.10081/) (2018)
- [Driving in the Matrix: Can Virtual Worlds Replace Human-Generated Annotations for Real World Tasks?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.01983/) (2016)
- [OTA: Optimal Transport Assignment for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14259/) (2021)
- [Unbiased Mean Teacher for Cross-domain Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.00707/) (2020)
- [Exploring Object Relation in Mean Teacher for Cross-Domain Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.11245/) (2019)
- [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, 17 of 17)

- [Mean Teacher DETR with Masked Feature Alignment: A Robust Domain Adaptive Detection Transformer Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.15646/) (2023)
- [DATR: Unsupervised Domain Adaptive Detection Transformer with Dataset-Level Adaptation and Prototypical Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.11765/) (2024)
- [Dynamic Retraining-Updating Mean Teacher for Source-Free Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.16497/) (2024)
- [A Plug-and-Play Method for Rare Human-Object Interactions Detection by Bridging Domain Gap](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21438/) (2024)
- [Differential Alignment for Domain Adaptive Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.12830/) (2024)
- [Diffusion Domain Teacher: Diffusion Guided Domain Adaptive Object Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.04211/) (2025)
- [Style-Adaptive Detection Transformer for Single-Source Domain Generalized Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.20498/) (2025)
- [Cross-domain Detection Transformer based on Spatial-aware and Semantic-aware Token Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.00222/) (2022)
- [Quantifying Context Bias in Domain Adaptation for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.14679/) (2024)
- [TITAN: Query-Token based Domain Adaptive Adversarial Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.21484/) (2025)
- [Cross Domain Object Detection via Multi-Granularity Confidence Alignment based Mean Teacher](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.07780/) (2024)
- [Teaching in adverse scenes: a statistically feedback-driven threshold and mask adjustment teacher-student framework for object detection in UAV images under adverse scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.11175/) (2025)
- [Domain Adaptive Object Detection via Dual-Stream Bilevel-Cycle Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.31373/) (2026)
- [CLDA-YOLO: Visual Contrastive Learning Based Domain Adaptive YOLO Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.11812/) (2024)
- [RT-DATR: Real-time Unsupervised Domain Adaptive Detection Transformer with Adversarial Feature Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.09196/) (2025)
- [Context Aware Grounded Teacher for Source Free Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.15404/) (2025)
- [Towards Unbiased Source-Free Object Detection via Vision Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.12765/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

DETR-style detectors stand out amongst in-domain scenarios, but their properties in domain shift settings are under-explored. This paper aims to build a simple but effective baseline with a DETR-style detector on domain shift settings based on two findings. For one, mitigating the domain shift on the backbone and the decoder output features excels in getting favorable results. For another, advanced domain alignment methods in both parts further enhance the performance. Thus, we propose the Object-Aware Alignment (OAA) module and the Optimal Transport based Alignment (OTA) module to achieve comprehensive domain alignment on the outputs of the backbone and the detector. The OAA module aligns the foreground regions identified by pseudo-labels in the backbone outputs, leading to domain-invariant based features. The OTA module utilizes sliced Wasserstein distance to maximize the retention of location information while minimizing the domain gap in the decoder outputs. We implement the findings and the alignment modules into our adaptation method, and it benchmarks the DETR-style detector on the domain shift settings. Experiments on various domain adaptive scenarios validate the effectiveness of our method.