# Domain Adaptive Object Detection via Balancing Between Self-Training and Adversarial Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.04815 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.04815/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 58 of its 73 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Nov 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 58)

- [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)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [On Calibration of Modern Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.04599/) (2017)
- [Fully Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4038/) (2014)
- [Dropout as a Bayesian Approximation: Representing Model Uncertainty in Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02142/) (2015)
- [The Cityscapes Dataset for Semantic Urban Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.01685/) (2016)
- [Simple and Scalable Predictive Uncertainty Estimation using Deep Ensembles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01474/) (2016)
- [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)
- [Can You Trust Your Model's Uncertainty? Evaluating Predictive Uncertainty Under Dataset Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02530/) (2019)
- [Cascade R-CNN: Delving into High Quality Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.00726/) (2017)
- [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)
- [CenterNet: Keypoint Triplets for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08189/) (2019)
- [FDA: Fourier Domain Adaptation for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05498/) (2020)
- [Domain Adaptive Faster R-CNN for Object Detection in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.03243/) (2018)
- [Confidence Regularized Self-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.09822/) (2019)
- [Semantic Foggy Scene Understanding with Synthetic Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.07819/) (2017)
- [Strong-Weak Distribution Alignment for Adaptive Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04798/) (2018)
- [Efficient Object Localization Using Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4280/) (2014)
- [Cross-Domain Weakly-Supervised Object Detection through Progressive Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.11365/) (2018)
- [A DIRT-T Approach to Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.08735/) (2018)
- [UnitBox: An Advanced Object Detection Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.01471/) (2016)
- [Driving in the Matrix: Can Virtual Worlds Replace Human-Generated Annotations for Real World Tasks?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.01983/) (2016)
- [Category Anchor-Guided Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13049/) (2019)
- [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, 6 of 6)

- [Vision Technologies with Applications in Traffic Surveillance Systems: A Holistic Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.00348/) (2024)
- [Uncertainty Quantification in Detection Transformers: Object-Level Calibration and Image-Level Reliability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.01782/) (2024)
- [Let Synthetic Data Shine: Domain Reassembly and Soft-Fusion for Single Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.13617/) (2025)
- [Detecting Endangered Marine Species in Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Imagery Using Point Annotations and Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.01932/) (2024)
- [Exploring Scale Shift in Crowd Localization under the Context of Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.19330/) (2025)
- [Balancing Multimodal Domain Generalization via Gradient Modulation and Projection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.14175/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Deep learning based object detectors struggle generalizing to a new target domain bearing significant variations in object and background. Most current methods align domains by using image or instance-level adversarial feature alignment. This often suffers due to unwanted background and lacks class-specific alignment. A straightforward approach to promote class-level alignment is to use high confidence predictions on unlabeled domain as pseudo-labels. These predictions are often noisy since model is poorly calibrated under domain shift. In this paper, we propose to leverage model's predictive uncertainty to strike the right balance between adversarial feature alignment and class-level alignment. We develop a technique to quantify predictive uncertainty on class assignments and bounding-box predictions. Model predictions with low uncertainty are used to generate pseudo-labels for self-training, whereas the ones with higher uncertainty are used to generate tiles for adversarial feature alignment. This synergy between tiling around uncertain object regions and generating pseudo-labels from highly certain object regions allows capturing both image and instance-level context during the model adaptation. We report thorough ablation study to reveal the impact of different components in our approach. Results on five diverse and challenging adaptation scenarios show that our approach outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods with noticeable margins.