# Predicting Class Distribution Shift for Reliable Domain Adaptive Object Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.06039 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.06039/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 36 of its 44 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Feb 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 36)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [The Cityscapes Dataset for Semantic Urban Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.01685/) (2016)
- [Fast R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.08083/) (2015)
- [Learning to Prompt for Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01134/) (2021)
- [MMDetection: Open MMLab Detection Toolbox and Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.07155/) (2019)
- [BDD100K: A Diverse Driving Dataset for Heterogeneous Multitask Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.04687/) (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)
- [Unbiased Teacher for Semi-Supervised Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09480/) (2021)
- [A Simple Semi-Supervised Learning Framework for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.04757/) (2020)
- [12-in-1: Multi-Task Vision and Language Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.02315/) (2019)
- [Strong-Weak Distribution Alignment for Adaptive Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04798/) (2018)
- [ZegCLIP: Towards Adapting CLIP for Zero-shot Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.03588/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Unsupervised Prompt Learning for Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03649/) (2022)
- [Harmonizing Transferability and Discriminability for Adapting Object Detectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.06297/) (2020)
- [Diversify and Match: A Domain Adaptive Representation Learning Paradigm for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.05396/) (2019)
- [Cross-domain Detection via Graph-induced Prototype Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.12849/) (2020)
- [MeGA-CDA: Memory Guided Attention for Category-Aware Unsupervised Domain Adaptive Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.04224/) (2021)
- [Cross-domain Object Detection through Coarse-to-Fine Feature Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.10275/) (2020)
- [A Free Lunch for Unsupervised Domain Adaptive Object Detection without Source Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.05400/) (2020)
- [Learning Domain Adaptive Object Detection with Probabilistic Teacher](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.06293/) (2022)
- [Domain Adaptive Object Detection via Asymmetric Tri-way Faster-RCNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.01571/) (2020)
- [Optimal Representations for Covariate Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.00057/) (2021)
- [Rethinking Pseudo Labels for Semi-Supervised Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.00168/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Language-Guided Instance-Aware Domain-Adaptive Panoptic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.03799/) (2024)
- [Universal Domain Adaptive Object Detection via Dual Probabilistic Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.11443/) (2024)
- [Improving Online Source-free Domain Adaptation for Object Detection by Unsupervised Data Acquisition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.19258/) (2023)
- [QueryAdapter: Rapid Adaptation of Vision-Language Models in Response to Natural Language Queries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.18735/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Unsupervised Domain Adaptive Object Detection (UDA-OD) uses unlabelled data to improve the reliability of robotic vision systems in open-world environments. Previous approaches to UDA-OD based on self-training have been effective in overcoming changes in the general appearance of images. However, shifts in a robot's deployment environment can also impact the likelihood that different objects will occur, termed class distribution shift. Motivated by this, we propose a framework for explicitly addressing class distribution shift to improve pseudo-label reliability in self-training. Our approach uses the domain invariance and contextual understanding of a pre-trained joint vision and language model to predict the class distribution of unlabelled data. By aligning the class distribution of pseudo-labels with this prediction, we provide weak supervision of pseudo-label accuracy. To further account for low quality pseudo-labels early in self-training, we propose an approach to dynamically adjust the number of pseudo-labels per image based on model confidence. Our method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches on several benchmarks, including a 4.7 mAP improvement when facing challenging class distribution shift.