# VFM-Guided Semi-Supervised Detection Transformer under Source-Free Constraints for Remote Sensing Object Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.11167 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.11167/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 47 of its 81 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Aug 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 47)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [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)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [Deformable DETR: Deformable Transformers for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04159/) (2020)
- [Grounding DINO: Marrying DINO with Grounded Pre-Training for Open-Set Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05499/) (2023)
- [Sinkhorn Distances: Lightspeed Computation of Optimal Transportation Distances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1306.0895/) (2013)
- [Arbitrary Style Transfer in Real-time with Adaptive Instance Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06868/) (2017)
- [DINOv3](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10104/) (2025)
- [DINO: DETR with Improved DeNoising Anchor Boxes for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.03605/) (2022)
- [DOTA: A Large-scale Dataset for Object Detection in Aerial Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10398/) (2017)
- [Domain Adaptive Faster R-CNN for Object Detection in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.03243/) (2018)
- [RemoteCLIP: A Vision Language Foundation Model for Remote Sensing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.11029/) (2023)
- [Object Detection in Optical Remote Sensing Images: A Survey and A New Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.00133/) (2019)
- [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)
- [xView: Objects in Context in Overhead Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.07856/) (2018)
- [Every Pixel Matters: Center-aware Feature Alignment for Domain Adaptive Object Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.08574/) (2020)
- [Style-Hallucinated Dual Consistency Learning for Domain Generalized Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02548/) (2022)
- [A Free Lunch for Unsupervised Domain Adaptive Object Detection without Source Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.05400/) (2020)
- [Unbiased Teacher v2: Semi-supervised Object Detection for Anchor-free and Anchor-based Detectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.09500/) (2022)
- [Instance Relation Graph Guided Source-Free Domain Adaptive Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15793/) (2022)
- [Exploring Sequence Feature Alignment for Domain Adaptive Detection Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.12636/) (2021)
- [RarePlanes: Synthetic Data Takes Flight](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.02963/) (2020)
- [Dense Teacher: Dense Pseudo-Labels for Semi-supervised Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.02541/) (2022)
- [Cross-Domain Few-Shot Object Detection via Enhanced Open-Set Object Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03094/) (2024)

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

- [Foundation Model Priors Enhance Object Focus in Feature Space for Source-Free Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.17514/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Unsupervised domain adaptation methods have been widely explored to bridge domain gaps. However, in real-world remote-sensing scenarios, privacy and transmission constraints often preclude access to source domain data, which limits their practical applicability. Recently, Source-Free Object Detection (SFOD) has emerged as a promising alternative, aiming at cross-domain adaptation without relying on source data, primarily through a self-training paradigm. Despite its potential, SFOD frequently suffers from training collapse caused by noisy pseudo-labels, especially in remote sensing imagery with dense objects and complex backgrounds. Considering that limited target domain annotations are often feasible in practice, we propose a Vision foundation-Guided DEtection TRansformer (VG-DETR), built upon a semi-supervised framework for SFOD in remote sensing images. VG-DETR integrates a Vision Foundation Model (VFM) into the training pipeline in a "free lunch" manner, leveraging a small amount of labeled target data to mitigate pseudo-label noise while improving the detector's feature-extraction capability. Specifically, we introduce a VFM-guided pseudo-label mining strategy that leverages the VFM's semantic priors to further assess the reliability of the generated pseudo-labels. By recovering potentially correct predictions from low-confidence outputs, our strategy improves pseudo-label quality and quantity. In addition, a dual-level VFM-guided alignment method is proposed, which aligns detector features with VFM embeddings at both the instance and image levels. Through contrastive learning among fine-grained prototypes and similarity matching between feature maps, this dual-level alignment further enhances the robustness of feature representations against domain gaps. Extensive experiments demonstrate that VG-DETR achieves superior performance in source-free remote sensing detection tasks.