# Mitigating Context Bias in Domain Adaptation for Object Detection using Mask Pooling

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.18446 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.18446/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 59 of its 85 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 May 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 59)

- [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)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [A Unified Approach to Interpreting Model Predictions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07874/) (2017)
- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [XGBoost: A Scalable Tree Boosting System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.02754/) (2016)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [The Cityscapes Dataset for Semantic Urban Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.01685/) (2016)
- [SSD: Single Shot MultiBox Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.02325/) (2015)
- [Domain-Adversarial Training of Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.07818/) (2015)
- [Unsupervised Domain Adaptation by Backpropagation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.7495/) (2014)
- [Improved Regularization of Convolutional Neural Networks with Cutout](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.04552/) (2017)
- [Counterfactual Fairness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06856/) (2017)
- [Domain Adaptive Faster R-CNN for Object Detection in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.03243/) (2018)
- [YOLOv11: An Overview of the Key Architectural Enhancements](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.17725/) (2024)
- [Semantic Foggy Scene Understanding with Synthetic Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.07819/) (2017)
- [Virtual Worlds as Proxy for Multi-Object Tracking Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.06457/) (2016)
- [Implicit Self-Regularization in Deep Neural Networks: Evidence from Random Matrix Theory and Implications for Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.01075/) (2018)
- [Avoiding Discrimination through Causal Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02744/) (2017)
- [MIC: Masked Image Consistency for Context-Enhanced Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.01322/) (2022)
- [Unbiased Mean Teacher for Cross-domain Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.00707/) (2020)
- [Algorithmic recourse under imperfect causal knowledge: a probabilistic approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.06831/) (2020)
- [Learning Data Augmentation Strategies for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.11172/) (2019)
- [Augmented Reality Meets Computer Vision : Efficient Data Generation for Urban Driving Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.01566/) (2017)
- [Predicting trends in the quality of state-of-the-art neural networks without access to training or testing data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.06716/) (2020)
- [Don't Judge an Object by Its Context: Learning to Overcome Contextual Bias](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.03152/) (2020)
- [Bridging Composite and Real: Towards End-to-end Deep Image Matting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.16188/) (2020)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Context bias refers to the association between the foreground objects and background during the object detection training process. Various methods have been proposed to minimize the context bias when applying the trained model to an unseen domain, known as domain adaptation for object detection (DAOD). But a principled approach to understand why the context bias occurs and how to remove it has been missing. In this work, we provide a causal view of the context bias, pointing towards the pooling operation in the convolution network architecture as the possible source of this bias. We present an alternative, Mask Pooling, which uses an additional input of foreground masks, to separate the pooling process in the respective foreground and background regions and show that this process leads the trained model to detect objects in a more robust manner under different domains. We also provide a benchmark designed to create an ultimate test for DAOD, using foregrounds in the presence of absolute random backgrounds, to analyze the robustness of the intended trained models. Through these experiments, we hope to provide a principled approach for minimizing context bias under domain shift.