# Relation Matters: Foreground-aware Graph-based Relational Reasoning for Domain Adaptive Object Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.02355 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.02355/

## Key facts

- Cited by 17 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 73 of its 106 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Jun 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 73)

- [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)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (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)
- [Graph Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10903/) (2017)
- [Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00667/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Fast R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.08083/) (2015)
- [Learning Deep Features for Discriminative Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.04150/) (2015)
- [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)
- [FCOS: Fully Convolutional One-Stage Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01355/) (2019)
- [YOLO9000: Better, Faster, Stronger](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.08242/) (2016)
- [Moment Matching for Multi-Source Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01754/) (2018)
- [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)
- [How transferable are features in deep neural networks?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.1792/) (2014)
- [Deep CORAL: Correlation Alignment for Deep Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.01719/) (2016)
- [CyCADA: Cycle-Consistent Adversarial Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.03213/) (2017)
- [CornerNet: Detecting Objects as Paired Keypoints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.01244/) (2018)
- [Maximum Classifier Discrepancy for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.02560/) (2017)
- [Deep Transfer Learning with Joint Adaptation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.06636/) (2016)
- [Unsupervised Image-to-Image Translation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.00848/) (2017)
- [Deep Domain Confusion: Maximizing for Domain Invariance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.3474/) (2014)
- [Word Translation Without Parallel Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.04087/) (2017)

## Built on by (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [Holistic Autonomous Driving Understanding by Bird's-Eye-View Injected Multi-Modal Large Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.00988/) (2024)
- [A Survey on Graph Neural Networks and Graph Transformers in Computer Vision: A Task-Oriented Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.13232/) (2022)
- [Image Textualization: An Automatic Framework for Creating Accurate and Detailed Image Descriptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.07502/) (2024)
- [Mix and Reason: Reasoning over Semantic Topology with Data Mixing for Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.07571/) (2022)
- [Learning Domain-Aware Detection Head with Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05718/) (2023)
- [AdaNeg: Adaptive Negative Proxy Guided OOD Detection with Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.20149/) (2024)
- [Activate and Reject: Towards Safe Domain Generalization under Category Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.04724/) (2023)
- [DA-Ada: Learning Domain-Aware Adapter for Domain Adaptive Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.09004/) (2024)
- [Knowledge-enhanced Neural Machine Reasoning: A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.02093/) (2023)
- [Unsupervised Adaptation of Polyp Segmentation Models via Coarse-to-Fine Self-Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.06665/) (2023)
- [Improving Object Detection via Local-global Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.05058/) (2024)
- [Dynamic Graph Induced Contour-aware Heat Conduction Network for Event-based Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.12908/) (2025)
- [Seeing Beyond: Extrapolative Domain Adaptive Panoramic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.15475/) (2026)
- [Deployment Prior Injection for Run-time Calibratable Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17207/) (2024)
- [A Pairwise DomMix Attentive Adversarial Network for Unsupervised Domain Adaptive Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.02835/) (2024)
- [Mixstyle-Entropy: Domain Generalization with Causal Intervention and Perturbation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03608/) (2024)
- [DA-Mamba: Learning Domain-Aware State Space Model for Global-Local Alignment in Domain Adaptive Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.18757/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Domain Adaptive Object Detection (DAOD) focuses on improving the generalization ability of object detectors via knowledge transfer. Recent advances in DAOD strive to change the emphasis of the adaptation process from global to local in virtue of fine-grained feature alignment methods. However, both the global and local alignment approaches fail to capture the topological relations among different foreground objects as the explicit dependencies and interactions between and within domains are neglected. In this case, only seeking one-vs-one alignment does not necessarily ensure the precise knowledge transfer. Moreover, conventional alignment-based approaches may be vulnerable to catastrophic overfitting regarding those less transferable regions (e.g. backgrounds) due to the accumulation of inaccurate localization results in the target domain. To remedy these issues, we first formulate DAOD as an open-set domain adaptation problem, in which the foregrounds and backgrounds are seen as the ``known classes'' and ``unknown class'' respectively. Accordingly, we propose a new and general framework for DAOD, named Foreground-aware Graph-based Relational Reasoning (FGRR), which incorporates graph structures into the detection pipeline to explicitly model the intra- and inter-domain foreground object relations on both pixel and semantic spaces, thereby endowing the DAOD model with the capability of relational reasoning beyond the popular alignment-based paradigm. The inter-domain visual and semantic correlations are hierarchically modeled via bipartite graph structures, and the intra-domain relations are encoded via graph attention mechanisms. Empirical results demonstrate that the proposed FGRR exceeds the state-of-the-art performance on four DAOD benchmarks.