# MTTrans: Cross-Domain Object Detection with Mean-Teacher Transformer

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.01643 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01643/

## Key facts

- Cited by 35 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 42 of its 49 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 May 2022.

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

- [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)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [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)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Informer: Beyond Efficient Transformer for Long Sequence Time-Series Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.07436/) (2020)
- [FixMatch: Simplifying Semi-Supervised Learning with Consistency and Confidence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.07685/) (2020)
- [FCOS: Fully Convolutional One-Stage Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01355/) (2019)
- [Generating Long Sequences with Sparse Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.10509/) (2019)
- [Panoptic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.00868/) (2018)
- [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)
- [Deeply-Supervised Nets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.5185/) (2014)
- [End-to-End Semi-Supervised Object Detection with Soft Teacher](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09018/) (2021)
- [A Simple Semi-Supervised Learning Framework for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.04757/) (2020)
- [Strong-Weak Distribution Alignment for Adaptive Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04798/) (2018)
- [RepPoints: Point Set Representation for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.11490/) (2019)
- [Driving in the Matrix: Can Virtual Worlds Replace Human-Generated Annotations for Real World Tasks?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.01983/) (2016)
- [Are Transformers More Robust Than CNNs?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.05464/) (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)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 35)

- [Transformer-Based Visual Segmentation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.09854/) (2023)
- [Lightweight Deep Learning for Resource-Constrained Environments: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.07236/) (2024)
- [Position-aware Structure Learning for Graph Topology-imbalance by Relieving Under-reaching and Over-squashing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.08302/) (2022)
- [Hyperbolic Geometric Graph Representation Learning for Hierarchy-imbalance Node Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.05059/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Align and Distill: Unifying and Improving Domain Adaptive Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.12029/) (2024)
- [Dynamic Retraining-Updating Mean Teacher for Source-Free Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.16497/) (2024)
- [Unsupervised Spike Depth Estimation via Cross-modality Cross-domain Knowledge Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.12527/) (2022)
- [GPA-3D: Geometry-aware Prototype Alignment for Unsupervised Domain Adaptive 3D Object Detection from Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.08140/) (2023)
- [ParkGaussian: Surround-view 3D Gaussian Splatting for Autonomous Parking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.01386/) (2026)
- [Generalized Diffusion Detector: Mining Robust Features from Diffusion Models for Domain-Generalized Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.02101/) (2025)
- [BEVUDA: Multi-geometric Space Alignments for Domain Adaptive BEV 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.17126/) (2022)
- [DA-BEV: Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Bird's Eye View Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.08687/) (2024)
- [Differential Alignment for Domain Adaptive Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.12830/) (2024)
- [D-MASTER: Mask Annealed Transformer for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation in Breast Cancer Detection from Mammograms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.06585/) (2024)
- [Source-Free Object Detection with Detection Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.11090/) (2025)
- [Generalized Category Discovery under Domain Shift: A Frequency Domain Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.00573/) (2025)
- [Enhancing cross-domain detection: adaptive class-aware contrastive transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.13264/) (2024)
- [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)
- [PM-DETR: Domain Adaptive Prompt Memory for Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.00313/) (2023)
- [Boosting Domain Generalized and Adaptive Detection with Diffusion Models: Fitness, Generalization, and Transferability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.21042/) (2025)
- [TITAN: Query-Token based Domain Adaptive Adversarial Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.21484/) (2025)
- [Beyond Boundaries: Leveraging Vision Foundation Models for Source-Free Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.07301/) (2025)
- [Calibration-based Dual Prototypical Contrastive Learning Approach for Domain Generalization Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.14282/) (2023)
- [BEVUDA++: Geometric-aware Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Multi-View 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.14151/) (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)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recently, DEtection TRansformer (DETR), an end-to-end object detection pipeline, has achieved promising performance. However, it requires large-scale labeled data and suffers from domain shift, especially when no labeled data is available in the target domain. To solve this problem, we propose an end-to-end cross-domain detection Transformer based on the mean teacher framework, MTTrans, which can fully exploit unlabeled target domain data in object detection training and transfer knowledge between domains via pseudo labels. We further propose the comprehensive multi-level feature alignment to improve the pseudo labels generated by the mean teacher framework taking advantage of the cross-scale self-attention mechanism in Deformable DETR. Image and object features are aligned at the local, global, and instance levels with domain query-based feature alignment (DQFA), bi-level graph-based prototype alignment (BGPA), and token-wise image feature alignment (TIFA). On the other hand, the unlabeled target domain data pseudo-labeled and available for the object detection training by the mean teacher framework can lead to better feature extraction and alignment. Thus, the mean teacher framework and the comprehensive multi-level feature alignment can be optimized iteratively and mutually based on the architecture of Transformers. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance in three domain adaptation scenarios, especially the result of Sim10k to Cityscapes scenario is remarkably improved from 52.6 mAP to 57.9 mAP. Code will be released.