# DA-Mamba: Domain Adaptive Hybrid Mamba-Transformer Based One-Stage Object Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.11178 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.11178/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Point clouds, detection and remote sensing, one of 10 directions in State-space sequence models (S4, Mamba).
- Builds on 32 of its 44 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Feb 2025.

## Placed in

- State-space sequence models (S4, Mamba) / [Point clouds, detection and remote sensing](https://mlsanity.com/ssm/point-clouds-detection-and-remote-sensing/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 32)

- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Mamba: Linear-Time Sequence Modeling with Selective State Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00752/) (2023)
- [SSD: Single Shot MultiBox Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.02325/) (2015)
- [Unsupervised Domain Adaptation by Backpropagation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.7495/) (2014)
- [Vision Mamba: Efficient Visual Representation Learning with Bidirectional State Space Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.09417/) (2024)
- [Domain Adaptive Faster R-CNN for Object Detection in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.03243/) (2018)
- [Strong-Weak Distribution Alignment for Adaptive Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04798/) (2018)
- [MambaVision: A Hybrid Mamba-Transformer Vision Backbone](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.08083/) (2024)
- [Cross-Domain Weakly-Supervised Object Detection through Progressive Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.11365/) (2018)
- [Progressive Feature Alignment for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.08585/) (2018)
- [EfficientVMamba: Atrous Selective Scan for Light Weight Visual Mamba](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.09977/) (2024)
- [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)
- [Diversify and Match: A Domain Adaptive Representation Learning Paradigm for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.05396/) (2019)
- [Multi-adversarial Faster-RCNN for Unrestricted Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.10343/) (2019)
- [Cross-domain Detection via Graph-induced Prototype Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.12849/) (2020)
- [Every Pixel Matters: Center-aware Feature Alignment for Domain Adaptive Object Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.08574/) (2020)
- [MeGA-CDA: Memory Guided Attention for Category-Aware Unsupervised Domain Adaptive Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.04224/) (2021)
- [Self-Training and Adversarial Background Regularization for Unsupervised Domain Adaptive One-Stage Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.00597/) (2019)
- [Cross-domain Object Detection through Coarse-to-Fine Feature Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.10275/) (2020)
- [Instance Relation Graph Guided Source-Free Domain Adaptive Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15793/) (2022)
- [Contrastive Mean Teacher for Domain Adaptive Object Detectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.03034/) (2023)
- [iFAN: Image-Instance Full Alignment Networks for Adaptive Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.04132/) (2020)
- [I3Net: Implicit Instance-Invariant Network for Adapting One-Stage Object Detectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13757/) (2021)
- [Domain-Specific Suppression for Adaptive Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.03570/) (2021)
- [DA-DETR: Domain Adaptive Detection Transformer with Information Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.17084/) (2021)
- [Scale-aware Automatic Augmentation for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.17220/) (2021)
- [DATR: Unsupervised Domain Adaptive Detection Transformer with Dataset-Level Adaptation and Prototypical Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.11765/) (2024)
- [Implicit Feature Alignment: Learn to Convert Text Recognizer to Text Spotter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.05920/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [GaussianOcc3D: A Gaussian-Based Adaptive Multi-modal 3D Occupancy Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.22729/) (2026)
- [SfMamba: Efficient Source-Free Domain Adaptation via Selective Scan Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.08608/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent 2D CNN-based domain adaptation approaches struggle with long-range dependencies due to limited receptive fields, making it difficult to adapt to target domains with significant spatial distribution changes. While transformer-based domain adaptation methods better capture distant relationships through self-attention mechanisms that facilitate more effective cross-domain feature alignment, their quadratic computational complexity makes practical deployment challenging for object detection tasks across diverse domains. Inspired by the global modeling and linear computation complexity of the Mamba architecture, we present the first domain-adaptive Mamba-based one-stage object detection model, termed DA-Mamba. Specifically, we combine Mamba's efficient state-space modeling with attention mechanisms to address domain-specific spatial and channel-wise variations. Our design leverages domain-adaptive spatial and channel-wise scanning within the Mamba block to extract highly transferable representations for efficient sequential processing, while cross-attention modules generate long-range, mixed-domain spatial features to enable robust soft alignment across domains. Besides, motivated by the observation that hybrid architectures introduce feature noise in domain adaptation tasks, we propose an entropy-based knowledge distillation framework with margin ReLU, which adaptively refines multi-level representations by suppressing irrelevant activations and aligning uncertainty across source and target domains. Finally, to prevent overfitting caused by the mixed-up features generated through cross-attention mechanisms, we propose entropy-driven gating attention with random perturbations that simultaneously refine target features and enhance model generalization.