# EventDance++: Language-guided Unsupervised Source-free Cross-modal Adaptation for Event-based Object Recognition

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.12778 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12778/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 61 of its 82 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Sep 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 61)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [MobileNetV2: Inverted Residuals and Linear Bottlenecks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04381/) (2018)
- [A ConvNet for the 2020s](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03545/) (2022)
- [Event-based Vision: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08405/) (2019)
- [Do We Really Need to Access the Source Data? Source Hypothesis Transfer for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.08546/) (2020)
- [High Speed and High Dynamic Range Video with an Event Camera](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.07165/) (2019)
- [Converting Static Image Datasets to Spiking Neuromorphic Datasets Using Saccades](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1507.07629/) (2015)
- [Unsupervised Event-based Learning of Optical Flow, Depth, and Egomotion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.08156/) (2018)
- [EV-FlowNet: Self-Supervised Optical Flow Estimation for Event-based Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.06898/) (2018)
- [End-to-End Learning of Representations for Asynchronous Event-Based Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08245/) (2019)
- [Training Deep Spiking Neural Networks using Backpropagation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.08782/) (2016)
- [Event-based Vision meets Deep Learning on Steering Prediction for Self-driving Cars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.01310/) (2018)
- [Domain-Specific Batch Normalization for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.03950/) (2019)
- [Cross Modal Distillation for Supervision Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1507.00448/) (2015)
- [Source Data-absent Unsupervised Domain Adaptation through Hypothesis Transfer and Labeling Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.07297/) (2020)
- [Ultimate SLAM? Combining Events, Images, and IMU for Robust Visual SLAM in HDR and High Speed Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.06310/) (2017)
- [The Norm Must Go On: Dynamic Unsupervised Domain Adaptation by Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.00463/) (2021)
- [Back to Event Basics: Self-Supervised Learning of Image Reconstruction for Event Cameras via Photometric Constancy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.08283/) (2020)
- [Deep Subdomain Adaptation Network for Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09388/) (2021)
- [Phased LSTM: Accelerating Recurrent Network Training for Long or Event-based Sequences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.09513/) (2016)
- [Event-based High Dynamic Range Image and Very High Frame Rate Video Generation using Conditional Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.08230/) (2018)
- [Source-Free Domain Adaptation via Distribution Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.11257/) (2022)
- [Deep Learning for Event-based Vision: A Comprehensive Survey and Benchmarks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.08890/) (2023)
- [Source-Free Unsupervised Domain Adaptation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.00265/) (2022)
- [Time-Ordered Recent Event (TORE) Volumes for Event Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.06108/) (2021)
- [VDM-DA: Virtual Domain Modeling for Source Data-free Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14357/) (2021)
- [Category Contrast for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation in Visual Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.02885/) (2021)
- [Domain Adaptive Semantic Segmentation Using Weak Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.15176/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Reducing Unimodal Bias in Multi-Modal Semantic Segmentation with Multi-Scale Functional Entropy Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.06635/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this paper, we address the challenging problem of cross-modal (image-to-events) adaptation for event-based recognition without accessing any labeled source image data. This task is arduous due to the substantial modality gap between images and events. With only a pre-trained source model available, the key challenge lies in extracting knowledge from this model and effectively transferring knowledge to the event-based domain. Inspired by the natural ability of language to convey semantics across different modalities, we propose EventDance++, a novel framework that tackles this unsupervised source-free cross-modal adaptation problem from a language-guided perspective. We introduce a language-guided reconstruction-based modality bridging (L-RMB) module, which reconstructs intensity frames from events in a self-supervised manner. Importantly, it leverages a vision-language model to provide further supervision, enriching the surrogate images and enhancing modality bridging. This enables the creation of surrogate images to extract knowledge (i.e., labels) from the source model. On top, we propose a multi-representation knowledge adaptation (MKA) module to transfer knowledge to target models, utilizing multiple event representations to capture the spatiotemporal characteristics of events fully. The L-RMB and MKA modules are jointly optimized to achieve optimal performance in bridging the modality gap. Experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate that EventDance++ performs on par with methods that utilize source data, validating the effectiveness of our language-guided approach in event-based recognition.