# Instance-Warp: Saliency Guided Image Warping for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.12712 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.12712/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 40 of its 54 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Mar 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 40)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [Grad-CAM: Visual Explanations from Deep Networks via Gradient-based Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02391/) (2016)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [Bootstrap your own latent: A new approach to self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07733/) (2020)
- [The Cityscapes Dataset for Semantic Urban Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.01685/) (2016)
- [SegFormer: Simple and Efficient Design for Semantic Segmentation with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.15203/) (2021)
- [Spatial Transformer Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02025/) (2015)
- [BDD100K: A Diverse Driving Dataset for Heterogeneous Multitask Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.04687/) (2018)
- [Playing for Data: Ground Truth from Computer Games](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.02192/) (2016)
- [Path Aggregation Network for Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.01534/) (2018)
- [ADVENT: Adversarial Entropy Minimization for Domain Adaptation in Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.12833/) (2018)
- [Learning to Adapt Structured Output Space for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.10349/) (2018)
- [Training Region-based Object Detectors with Online Hard Example Mining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.03540/) (2016)
- [FDA: Fourier Domain Adaptation for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05498/) (2020)
- [DAFormer: Improving Network Architectures and Training Strategies for Domain-Adaptive Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14887/) (2021)
- [Prototypical Pseudo Label Denoising and Target Structure Learning for Domain Adaptive Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.10979/) (2021)
- [DACS: Domain Adaptation via Cross-domain Mixed Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.08702/) (2020)
- [MIC: Masked Image Consistency for Context-Enhanced Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.01322/) (2022)
- [HRDA: Context-Aware High-Resolution Domain-Adaptive Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.13132/) (2022)
- [Unbiased Mean Teacher for Cross-domain Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.00707/) (2020)
- [Cross-Domain Adaptive Teacher for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.13216/) (2021)
- [An Analysis of Scale Invariance in Object Detection - SNIP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.08189/) (2017)
- [Map-Guided Curriculum Domain Adaptation and Uncertainty-Aware Evaluation for Semantic Nighttime Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14553/) (2020)
- [Cross-domain Object Detection through Coarse-to-Fine Feature Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.10275/) (2020)
- [DANNet: A One-Stage Domain Adaptation Network for Unsupervised Nighttime Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.10834/) (2021)
- [Domain Adaptive Semantic Segmentation with Self-Supervised Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13613/) (2021)
- [Learning to Zoom: a Saliency-Based Sampling Layer for Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.03355/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [ROADWork: A Dataset and Benchmark for Learning to Recognize, Observe, Analyze and Drive Through Work Zones](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.07661/) (2024)
- [Constructive Distortion: Improving MLLMs with Attention-Guided Image Warping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.09741/) (2025)
- [Heuristic Self-Paced Learning for Domain Adaptive Semantic Segmentation under Adverse Conditions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.24322/) (2026)
- [AdaCount: Training-Free Similarity-Guided Spatial and Feature Adaptation for Zero-Shot Object Counting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.02139/) (2026)
- [WarpI2I: Image Warping for Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.31018/) (2026)
- [Ultra: Unsupervised Cross-Task Optimization for Reliable Restoration Segmentation Collaboration under Adverse Weather](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.16589/) (2026)
- [Variable-Granularity Tokenization for High-Resolution Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.28706/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Driving is challenging in conditions like night, rain, and snow. Lack of good labeled datasets has hampered progress in scene understanding under such conditions. Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) using large labeled clear-day datasets is a promising research direction in such cases. However, many UDA methods are trained with dominant scene backgrounds (e.g., roads, sky, sidewalks) that appear dramatically different across domains. As a result, they struggle to learn effective features of smaller and often sparse foreground objects (e.g., people, vehicles, signs). In this work, we improve UDA training by applying in-place image warping to focus on salient objects. We design instance-level saliency guidance to adaptively oversample object regions and undersample background areas, which reduces adverse effects from background context and enhances backbone feature learning. Our approach improves adaptation across geographies, lighting, and weather conditions, and is agnostic to the task (segmentation, detection), domain adaptation algorithm, saliency guidance, and underlying model architecture. Result highlights include +6.1 mAP50 for BDD100K Clear rightarrow DENSE Foggy, +3.7 mAP50 for BDD100K Day rightarrow Night, +3.0 mAP50 for BDD100K Clear rightarrow Rainy, and +6.3 mIoU for Cityscapes rightarrow ACDC. Besides, Our method adds minimal training memory and no additional inference latency. Code is available at https://github.com/ShenZheng2000/Instance-Warp