# DuET: Dual Incremental Object Detection via Exemplar-Free Task Arithmetic

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.21260 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.21260/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 34 of its 53 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Jun 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 34)

- [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)
- [Learning without Forgetting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.09282/) (2016)
- [Decoupled Weight Decay Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.05101/) (2017)
- [BDD100K: A Diverse Driving Dataset for Heterogeneous Multitask Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.04687/) (2018)
- [Editing Models with Task Arithmetic](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04089/) (2022)
- [TIES-Merging: Resolving Interference When Merging Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.01708/) (2023)
- [Exploring Plain Vision Transformer Backbones for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16527/) (2022)
- [Language Models are Super Mario: Absorbing Abilities from Homologous Models as a Free Lunch](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.03099/) (2023)
- [Merging Models with Fisher-Weighted Averaging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09832/) (2021)
- [DETRs Beat YOLOs on Real-time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08069/) (2023)
- [Dataless Knowledge Fusion by Merging Weights of Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09849/) (2022)
- [Libra R-CNN: Towards Balanced Learning for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.02701/) (2019)
- [S-Prompts Learning with Pre-trained Transformers: An Occam's Razor for Domain Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12819/) (2022)
- [Cross-Domain Weakly-Supervised Object Detection through Progressive Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.11365/) (2018)
- [Incremental Learning of Object Detectors without Catastrophic Forgetting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.06977/) (2017)
- [OW-DETR: Open-world Detection Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01513/) (2021)
- [EMR-Merging: Tuning-Free High-Performance Model Merging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.17461/) (2024)
- [Overcoming Catastrophic Forgetting in Incremental Object Detection via Elastic Response Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02136/) (2022)
- [MagMax: Leveraging Model Merging for Seamless Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.06322/) (2024)
- [Faster ILOD: Incremental Learning for Object Detectors based on Faster RCNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.03901/) (2020)
- [Continual Detection Transformer for Incremental Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03110/) (2023)
- [An Efficient Domain-Incremental Learning Approach to Drive in All Weather Conditions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.08817/) (2022)
- [SDDGR: Stable Diffusion-based Deep Generative Replay for Class Incremental Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17323/) (2024)
- [Multi-View Correlation Distillation for Incremental Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.01787/) (2021)
- [RODEO: Replay for Online Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.06439/) (2020)
- [SID: Incremental Learning for Anchor-Free Object Detection via Selective and Inter-Related Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15439/) (2020)
- [Augmented Box Replay: Overcoming Foreground Shift for Incremental Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.12427/) (2023)
- [Improving Single Domain-Generalized Object Detection: A Focus on Diversification and Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14497/) (2024)
- [Continual Object Detection: A review of definitions, strategies, and challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.15445/) (2022)

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

- [EW-DETR: Evolving World Object Detection via Incremental Low-Rank DEtection TRansformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.20985/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Real-world object detection systems, such as those in autonomous driving and surveillance, must continuously learn new object categories and simultaneously adapt to changing environmental conditions. Existing approaches, Class Incremental Object Detection (CIOD) and Domain Incremental Object Detection (DIOD) only address one aspect of this challenge. CIOD struggles in unseen domains, while DIOD suffers from catastrophic forgetting when learning new classes, limiting their real-world applicability. To overcome these limitations, we introduce Dual Incremental Object Detection (DuIOD), a more practical setting that simultaneously handles class and domain shifts in an exemplar-free manner. We propose DuET, a Task Arithmetic-based model merging framework that enables stable incremental learning while mitigating sign conflicts through a novel Directional Consistency Loss. Unlike prior methods, DuET is detector-agnostic, allowing models like YOLO11 and RT-DETR to function as real-time incremental object detectors. To comprehensively evaluate both retention and adaptation, we introduce the Retention-Adaptability Index (RAI), which combines the Average Retention Index (Avg RI) for catastrophic forgetting and the Average Generalization Index for domain adaptability into a common ground. Extensive experiments on the Pascal Series and Diverse Weather Series demonstrate DuET's effectiveness, achieving a +13.12% RAI improvement while preserving 89.3% Avg RI on the Pascal Series (4 tasks), as well as a +11.39% RAI improvement with 88.57% Avg RI on the Diverse Weather Series (3 tasks), outperforming existing methods.