# Attention Residual Fusion Network with Contrast for Source-free Domain Adaptation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.22142 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.22142/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in General knowledge distillation methods, one of 12 directions in Knowledge distillation.
- Builds on 63 of its 91 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Oct 2025.

## Placed in

- Knowledge distillation / [General knowledge distillation methods](https://mlsanity.com/distill/general-knowledge-distillation-methods/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 63)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [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)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [Fully Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4038/) (2014)
- [Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01507/) (2017)
- [Supervised Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.11362/) (2020)
- [FitNets: Hints for Thin Deep Nets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6550/) (2014)
- [Understanding Contrastive Representation Learning through Alignment and Uniformity on the Hypersphere](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.10242/) (2020)
- [Moment Matching for Multi-Source Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01754/) (2018)
- [Learning Transferable Features with Deep Adaptation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.02791/) (2015)
- [Adversarial Discriminative Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.05464/) (2017)
- [Gradient Surgery for Multi-Task Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.06782/) (2020)
- [Deep Hashing Network for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.07522/) (2017)
- [Deep Clustering for Unsupervised Learning of Visual Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.05520/) (2018)
- [Relational Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05068/) (2019)
- [Do We Really Need to Access the Source Data? Source Hypothesis Transfer for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.08546/) (2020)
- [Maximum Classifier Discrepancy for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.02560/) (2017)
- [Be Your Own Teacher: Improve the Performance of Convolutional Neural Networks via Self Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.08094/) (2019)
- [VisDA: The Visual Domain Adaptation Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.06924/) (2017)
- [Contrastive Adaptation Network for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.00976/) (2019)
- [Semi-supervised Domain Adaptation via Minimax Entropy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.06487/) (2019)
- [Knowledge Distillation and Student-Teacher Learning for Visual Intelligence: A Review and New Outlooks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05937/) (2020)
- [Contrastive Test-Time Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.10377/) (2022)
- [Characterizing and Avoiding Negative Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.09751/) (2018)
- [SCA-CNN: Spatial and Channel-wise Attention in Convolutional Networks for Image Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.05594/) (2016)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Source-free domain adaptation (SFDA) involves training a model on source domain and then applying it to a related target domain without access to the source data and labels during adaptation. The complexity of scene information and lack of the source domain make SFDA a difficult task. Recent studies have shown promising results, but many approaches to domain adaptation concentrate on domain shift and neglect the effects of negative transfer, which may impede enhancements of model performance during adaptation. n this paper, addressing this issue, we propose a novel framework of Attention Residual Fusion Network (ARFNet) based on contrast learning for SFDA to alleviate negative transfer and domain shift during the progress of adaptation, in which attention residual fusion, global-local attention contrast, and dynamic centroid evaluation are exploited. Concretely, the attention mechanism is first exploited to capture the discriminative region of the target object. Then, in each block, attention features are decomposed into spatial-wise and channel-wise attentions to achieve the cross-layer attention residual fusion progressively and self-distillation. During adaptation progress, we contrast global and local representations to improve the perceptual capabilities of different categories, which enables the model to discriminate variations between inner-class and intra-class. Finally, a dynamic centroid evaluation strategy is exploited to evaluate the trustworthy centroids and labels for self-supervised self-distillation, which aims to accurately approximate the center of the source domain and pseudo-labels to mitigate domain shift. To validate the efficacy, we execute comprehensive experiments on five benchmarks of varying scales. Experimental outcomes indicate that our method surpasses other techniques, attaining superior performance across SFDA benchmarks.