# SfMamba: Efficient Source-Free Domain Adaptation via Selective Scan Modeling

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.08608 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.08608/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Vision Mamba backbones, one of 10 directions in State-space sequence models (S4, Mamba).
- Builds on 45 of its 73 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Jan 2026.

## Placed in

- State-space sequence models (S4, Mamba) / [Vision Mamba backbones](https://mlsanity.com/ssm/vision-mamba-backbones/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 45)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Grad-CAM: Visual Explanations from Deep Networks via Gradient-based Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02391/) (2016)
- [Adding Conditional Control to Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05543/) (2023)
- [Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01507/) (2017)
- [Mamba: Linear-Time Sequence Modeling with Selective State Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00752/) (2023)
- [Training data-efficient image transformers & distillation through attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12877/) (2020)
- [A ConvNet for the 2020s](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03545/) (2022)
- [Domain-Adversarial Training of Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.07818/) (2015)
- [CBAM: Convolutional Block Attention Module](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.06521/) (2018)
- [Moment Matching for Multi-Source Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01754/) (2018)
- [Deep Hashing Network for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.07522/) (2017)
- [Vision Mamba: Efficient Visual Representation Learning with Bidirectional State Space Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.09417/) (2024)
- [When Does Label Smoothing Help?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02629/) (2019)
- [VMamba: Visual State Space Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10166/) (2024)
- [Do We Really Need to Access the Source Data? Source Hypothesis Transfer for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.08546/) (2020)
- [ECA-Net: Efficient Channel Attention for Deep Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.03151/) (2019)
- [FDA: Fourier Domain Adaptation for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05498/) (2020)
- [Noise2Noise: Learning Image Restoration without Clean Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.04189/) (2018)
- [VisDA: The Visual Domain Adaptation Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.06924/) (2017)
- [Return of Frustratingly Easy Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.05547/) (2015)
- [Semi-supervised Domain Adaptation via Minimax Entropy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.06487/) (2019)
- [Bridging Theory and Algorithm for Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05801/) (2019)
- [FcaNet: Frequency Channel Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.11879/) (2020)
- [Exploiting the Intrinsic Neighborhood Structure for Source-free Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.04202/) (2021)
- [Generalized Source-free Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.01614/) (2021)
- [Unsupervised Domain Adaptation via Structurally Regularized Deep Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.08607/) (2020)
- [CDTrans: Cross-domain Transformer for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.06165/) (2021)
- [Domain Adaptation via Prompt Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.06687/) (2022)
- [Agent Attention: On the Integration of Softmax and Linear Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.08874/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Source-free domain adaptation (SFDA) tackles the critical challenge of adapting source-pretrained models to unlabeled target domains without access to source data, overcoming data privacy and storage limitations in real-world applications. However, existing SFDA approaches struggle with the trade-off between perception field and computational efficiency in domain-invariant feature learning. Recently, Mamba has offered a promising solution through its selective scan mechanism, which enables long-range dependency modeling with linear complexity. However, the Visual Mamba (i.e., VMamba) remains limited in capturing channel-wise frequency characteristics critical for domain alignment and maintaining spatial robustness under significant domain shifts. To address these, we propose a framework called SfMamba to fully explore the stable dependency in source-free model transfer. SfMamba introduces Channel-wise Visual State-Space block that enables channel-sequence scanning for domain-invariant feature extraction. In addition, SfMamba involves a Semantic-Consistent Shuffle strategy that disrupts background patch sequences in 2D selective scan while preserving prediction consistency to mitigate error accumulation. Comprehensive evaluations across multiple benchmarks show that SfMamba achieves consistently stronger performance than existing methods while maintaining favorable parameter efficiency, offering a practical solution for SFDA. Our code is available at https://github.com/chenxi52/SfMamba.