# Domain-RAG: Retrieval-Guided Compositional Image Generation for Cross-Domain Few-Shot Object Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.05872 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.05872/

## Key facts

- Cited by 15 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 59 of its 84 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Jun 2025.

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

- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11401/) (2020)
- [Adding Conditional Control to Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05543/) (2023)
- [SDXL: Improving Latent Diffusion Models for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.01952/) (2023)
- [Grounding DINO: Marrying DINO with Grounded Pre-Training for Open-Set Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05499/) (2023)
- [InstructBLIP: Towards General-purpose Vision-Language Models with Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06500/) (2023)
- [Arbitrary Style Transfer in Real-time with Adaptive Instance Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06868/) (2017)
- [YOLOv4: Optimal Speed and Accuracy of Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.10934/) (2020)
- [Resolution-robust Large Mask Inpainting with Fourier Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07161/) (2021)
- [Exploring Plain Vision Transformer Backbones for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16527/) (2022)
- [Detecting Twenty-thousand Classes using Image-level Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.02605/) (2022)
- [Simple Copy-Paste is a Strong Data Augmentation Method for Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.07177/) (2020)
- [Object Detection in Optical Remote Sensing Images: A Survey and A New Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.00133/) (2019)
- [Frustratingly Simple Few-Shot Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.06957/) (2020)
- [Few-shot Object Detection via Feature Reweighting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01866/) (2018)
- [G-Retriever: Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Textual Graph Understanding and Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.07630/) (2024)
- [Cross-Domain Weakly-Supervised Object Detection through Progressive Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.11365/) (2018)
- [Few-Shot Object Detection with Attention-RPN and Multi-Relation Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.01998/) (2019)
- [Cross-Domain Few-Shot Classification via Learned Feature-Wise Transformation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.08735/) (2020)
- [Meta R-CNN : Towards General Solver for Instance-level Few-shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.13032/) (2019)
- [FSCE: Few-Shot Object Detection via Contrastive Proposal Encoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.05950/) (2021)
- [DeFRCN: Decoupled Faster R-CNN for Few-Shot Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.09017/) (2021)
- [SmallCap: Lightweight Image Captioning Prompted with Retrieval Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.15323/) (2022)
- [A Realistic Fish-Habitat Dataset to Evaluate Algorithms for Underwater Visual Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.12603/) (2020)
- [GeoDiffusion: Text-Prompted Geometric Control for Object Detection Data Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.04607/) (2023)
- [StyleAdv: Meta Style Adversarial Training for Cross-Domain Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.09309/) (2023)
- [Boosting the Generalization Capability in Cross-Domain Few-shot Learning via Noise-enhanced Supervised Autoencoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05028/) (2021)
- [Fine-grained Late-interaction Multi-modal Retrieval for Retrieval Augmented Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.17133/) (2023)
- [Locate Anything on Earth: Advancing Open-Vocabulary Object Detection for Remote Sensing Community](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.09110/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [ATBench: A Diverse and Realistic Agent Trajectory Benchmark for Safety Evaluation and Diagnosis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.02022/) (2026)
- [EgoCross: Benchmarking Multimodal Large Language Models for Cross-Domain Egocentric Video Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10729/) (2025)
- [EgoNight: Towards Egocentric Vision Understanding at Night with a Challenging Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.06218/) (2025)
- [The Second Challenge on Cross-Domain Few-Shot Object Detection at NTIRE 2026: Methods and Results](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.11998/) (2026)
- [AgentDoG 1.5: A Lightweight and Scalable Alignment Framework for AI Agent Safety and Security](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.29801/) (2026)
- [Diverse Instance Generation via Diffusion Models for Enhanced Few-Shot Object Detection in Remote Sensing Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.18031/) (2025)
- [Learning Multi-Modal Prototypes for Cross-Domain Few-Shot Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.18811/) (2026)
- [Remedying Target-Domain Astigmatism for Cross-Domain Few-Shot Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.18541/) (2026)
- [A Closer Look at Cross-Domain Few-Shot Object Detection: Fine-Tuning Matters and Parallel Decoder Helps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.28182/) (2026)
- [Prompt-Driven Simulation with Feature Perturbation for Cross-Domain Few-Shot Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.01348/) (2026)
- [RAG-6DPose: Retrieval-Augmented 6D Pose Estimation via Leveraging CAD as Knowledge Base](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.18856/) (2025)
- [Object-Centric Data Synthesis for Category-level Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.23450/) (2025)
- [GiPL: Generative augmented iterative Pseudo-Labeling for Cross-Domain Few-Shot Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.29539/) (2026)
- [Free-Lunch Augmentation by Revisiting Diffusion-Based Data Generation for Cross-Domain Few-Shot Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.04394/) (2026)
- [The First EgoCross Challenge at EgoVis 2026: Cross-Domain Egocentric Video Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.04589/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Cross-Domain Few-Shot Object Detection (CD-FSOD) aims to detect novel objects with only a handful of labeled samples from previously unseen domains. While data augmentation and generative methods have shown promise in few-shot learning, their effectiveness for CD-FSOD remains unclear due to the need for both visual realism and domain alignment. Existing strategies, such as copy-paste augmentation and text-to-image generation, often fail to preserve the correct object category or produce backgrounds coherent with the target domain, making them non-trivial to apply directly to CD-FSOD. To address these challenges, we propose Domain-RAG, a training-free, retrieval-guided compositional image generation framework tailored for CD-FSOD. Domain-RAG consists of three stages: domain-aware background retrieval, domain-guided background generation, and foreground-background composition. Specifically, the input image is first decomposed into foreground and background regions. We then retrieve semantically and stylistically similar images to guide a generative model in synthesizing a new background, conditioned on both the original and retrieved contexts. Finally, the preserved foreground is composed with the newly generated domain-aligned background to form the generated image. Without requiring any additional supervision or training, Domain-RAG produces high-quality, domain-consistent samples across diverse tasks, including CD-FSOD, remote sensing FSOD, and camouflaged FSOD. Extensive experiments show consistent improvements over strong baselines and establish new state-of-the-art results. Codes will be released upon acceptance.