# Unsupervised Domain Adaptive Detection with Network Stability Analysis

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.08182 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.08182/

## Key facts

- Cited by 10 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 56 of its 66 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Aug 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 56)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Fast R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.08083/) (2015)
- [Rich feature hierarchies for accurate object detection and semantic segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.2524/) (2013)
- [FCOS: Fully Convolutional One-Stage Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01355/) (2019)
- [Learning Transferable Features with Deep Adaptation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.02791/) (2015)
- [BDD100K: A Diverse Driving Dataset for Heterogeneous Multitask Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.04687/) (2018)
- [Cascade R-CNN: Delving into High Quality Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.00726/) (2017)
- [Objects as Points](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.07850/) (2019)
- [CornerNet: Detecting Objects as Paired Keypoints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.01244/) (2018)
- [Focal Loss for Dense Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.02002/) (2017)
- [Unpaired Image-to-Image Translation using Cycle-Consistent Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.10593/) (2017)
- [Deep Transfer Learning with Joint Adaptation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.06636/) (2016)
- [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)
- [Unsupervised Domain Adaptation with Residual Transfer Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.04433/) (2016)
- [Propagate Yourself: Exploring Pixel-Level Consistency for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10043/) (2020)
- [Strong-Weak Distribution Alignment for Adaptive Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04798/) (2018)
- [Driving in the Matrix: Can Virtual Worlds Replace Human-Generated Annotations for Real World Tasks?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.01983/) (2016)
- [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)
- [Cross-Domain Adaptive Teacher for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.13216/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [Large Self-Supervised Models Bridge the Gap in Domain Adaptive Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.23220/) (2025)
- [DA-Ada: Learning Domain-Aware Adapter for Domain Adaptive Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.09004/) (2024)
- [Generalized Diffusion Detector: Mining Robust Features from Diffusion Models for Domain-Generalized Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.02101/) (2025)
- [Towards Unsupervised Model Selection for Domain Adaptive Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.17284/) (2024)
- [Diffusion Domain Teacher: Diffusion Guided Domain Adaptive Object Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.04211/) (2025)
- [Boosting Domain Generalized and Adaptive Detection with Diffusion Models: Fitness, Generalization, and Transferability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.21042/) (2025)
- [Towards Conditional Feature Alignment for Cross-Domain Counting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.17137/) (2025)
- [PAGen: Phase-guided Amplitude Generation for Domain-adaptive Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.22029/) (2025)
- [DA-Mamba: Learning Domain-Aware State Space Model for Global-Local Alignment in Domain Adaptive Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.18757/) (2026)
- [Semantically Compatible Knowledge Distillation for Cross-Domain Object Detection with Vision Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.20916/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Domain adaptive detection aims to improve the generality of a detector, learned from the labeled source domain, on the unlabeled target domain. In this work, drawing inspiration from the concept of stability from the control theory that a robust system requires to remain consistent both externally and internally regardless of disturbances, we propose a novel framework that achieves unsupervised domain adaptive detection through stability analysis. In specific, we treat discrepancies between images and regions from different domains as disturbances, and introduce a novel simple but effective Network Stability Analysis (NSA) framework that considers various disturbances for domain adaptation. Particularly, we explore three types of perturbations including heavy and light image-level disturbances and instancelevel disturbance. For each type, NSA performs external consistency analysis on the outputs from raw and perturbed images and/or internal consistency analysis on their features, using teacher-student models. By integrating NSA into Faster R-CNN, we immediately achieve state-of-the-art results. In particular, we set a new record of 52.7% mAP on Cityscapes-to-FoggyCityscapes, showing the potential of NSA for domain adaptive detection. It is worth noticing, our NSA is designed for general purpose, and thus applicable to one-stage detection model (e.g., FCOS) besides the adopted one, as shown by experiments. https://github.com/tiankongzhang/NSA.