# CLDA-YOLO: Visual Contrastive Learning Based Domain Adaptive YOLO Detector

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.11812 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.11812/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Detection and dense prediction distillation, one of 12 directions in Knowledge distillation.
- Builds on 48 of its 61 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Dec 2024.

## Placed in

- Knowledge distillation / [Detection and dense prediction distillation](https://mlsanity.com/distill/detection-and-dense-prediction-distillation/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 48)

- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Sigmoid Loss for Language Image Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15343/) (2023)
- [Domain-Adversarial Training of Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.07818/) (2015)
- [Supervised Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.11362/) (2020)
- [Improved Baselines with Momentum Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.04297/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Domain Adaptation by Backpropagation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.7495/) (2014)
- [Unsupervised Feature Learning via Non-Parametric Instance-level Discrimination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.01978/) (2018)
- [FCOS: Fully Convolutional One-Stage Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01355/) (2019)
- [BDD100K: A Diverse Driving Dataset for Heterogeneous Multitask Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.04687/) (2018)
- [Deep CORAL: Correlation Alignment for Deep Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.01719/) (2016)
- [Domain Adaptive Faster R-CNN for Object Detection in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.03243/) (2018)
- [YOLOv9: Learning What You Want to Learn Using Programmable Gradient Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.13616/) (2024)
- [Generalized Focal Loss: Learning Qualified and Distributed Bounding Boxes for Dense Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.04388/) (2020)
- [Semantic Foggy Scene Understanding with Synthetic Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.07819/) (2017)
- [End-to-End Semi-Supervised Object Detection with Soft Teacher](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09018/) (2021)
- [Unbiased Teacher for Semi-Supervised Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09480/) (2021)
- [Strong-Weak Distribution Alignment for Adaptive Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04798/) (2018)
- [Multi-Scale Boosted Dehazing Network with Dense Feature Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.13388/) (2020)
- [TOOD: Task-aligned One-stage Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07755/) (2021)
- [Driving in the Matrix: Can Virtual Worlds Replace Human-Generated Annotations for Real World Tasks?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.01983/) (2016)
- [Generalization and Equilibrium in Generative Adversarial Nets (GANs)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.00573/) (2017)
- [Unbiased Mean Teacher for Cross-domain Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.00707/) (2020)
- [Progressive Domain Adaptation for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.11319/) (2019)
- [Harmonizing Transferability and Discriminability for Adapting Object Detectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.06297/) (2020)
- [Cross-Domain Adaptive Teacher for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.13216/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Unsupervised domain adaptive (UDA) algorithms can markedly enhance the performance of object detectors under conditions of domain shifts, thereby reducing the necessity for extensive labeling and retraining. Current domain adaptive object detection algorithms primarily cater to two-stage detectors, which tend to offer minimal improvements when directly applied to single-stage detectors such as YOLO. Intending to benefit the YOLO detector from UDA, we build a comprehensive domain adaptive architecture using a teacher-student cooperative system for the YOLO detector. In this process, we propose uncertainty learning to cope with pseudo-labeling generated by the teacher model with extreme uncertainty and leverage dynamic data augmentation to asymptotically adapt the teacher-student system to the environment. To address the inability of single-stage object detectors to align at multiple stages, we utilize a unified visual contrastive learning paradigm that aligns instance at backbone and head respectively, which steadily improves the robustness of the detectors in cross-domain tasks. In summary, we present an unsupervised domain adaptive YOLO detector based on visual contrastive learning (CLDA-YOLO), which achieves highly competitive results across multiple domain adaptive datasets without any reduction in inference speed.