# FSCA-Net: Feature-Separated Cross-Attention Network for Robust Multi-Dataset Training

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.01540 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.01540/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 35 of its 50 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Feb 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 35)

- [Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00667/) (2022)
- [Deep Variational Information Bottleneck](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00410/) (2016)
- [Learning Representations by Maximizing Mutual Information Across Views](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.00910/) (2019)
- [Unified Deep Supervised Domain Adaptation and Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.10190/) (2017)
- [On Mutual Information Maximization for Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.13625/) (2019)
- [S^3-Rec: Self-Supervised Learning for Sequential Recommendation with Mutual Information Maximization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.07873/) (2020)
- [CSRNet: Dilated Convolutional Neural Networks for Understanding the Highly Congested Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.10062/) (2018)
- [CLUB: A Contrastive Log-ratio Upper Bound of Mutual Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.12013/) (2020)
- [Composition Loss for Counting, Density Map Estimation and Localization in Dense Crowds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.01050/) (2018)
- [Bayesian Loss for Crowd Count Estimation with Point Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.03684/) (2019)
- [Context-Aware Crowd Counting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.10452/) (2018)
- [Learning from Synthetic Data for Crowd Counting in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.03303/) (2019)
- [Distribution Matching for Crowd Counting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.13077/) (2020)
- [JHU-CROWD++: Large-Scale Crowd Counting Dataset and A Benchmark Method](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.03597/) (2020)
- [Switching Convolutional Neural Network for Crowd Counting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.00199/) (2017)
- [Boosting Crowd Counting via Multifaceted Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02636/) (2022)
- [Rethinking Spatial Invariance of Convolutional Networks for Object Counting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.05253/) (2022)
- [From Open Set to Closed Set: Counting Objects by Spatial Divide-and-Conquer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.06473/) (2019)
- [STEERER: Resolving Scale Variations for Counting and Localization via Selective Inheritance Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.10468/) (2023)
- [Point-Query Quadtree for Crowd Counting, Localization, and More](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.13814/) (2023)
- [PCC Net: Perspective Crowd Counting via Spatial Convolutional Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.10085/) (2019)
- [Learn to Scale: Generating Multipolar Normalized Density Maps for Crowd Counting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.12428/) (2019)
- [SCAR: Spatial-/Channel-wise Attention Regression Networks for Crowd Counting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.03716/) (2019)
- [Domain-adaptive Crowd Counting via High-quality Image Translation and Density Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.03677/) (2019)
- [Encoder-Decoder Based Convolutional Neural Networks with Multi-Scale-Aware Modules for Crowd Counting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.05586/) (2020)
- [Improving Point-based Crowd Counting and Localization Based on Auxiliary Point Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.10589/) (2024)
- [CrowdDiff: Multi-hypothesis Crowd Density Estimation using Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12790/) (2023)
- [Neuron Linear Transformation: Modeling the Domain Shift for Crowd Counting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.02133/) (2020)
- [Deep Learning for Channel Coding via Neural Mutual Information Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.02865/) (2019)
- [Boosting Detection in Crowd Analysis via Underutilized Output Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.16187/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Crowd counting plays a vital role in public safety, traffic regulation, and smart city management. However, despite the impressive progress achieved by CNN- and Transformer-based models, their performance often deteriorates when applied across diverse environments due to severe domain discrepancies. Direct joint training on multiple datasets, which intuitively should enhance generalization, instead results in negative transfer, as shared and domain-specific representations become entangled. To address this challenge, we propose the Feature Separation and Cross-Attention Network FSCA-Net, a unified framework that explicitly disentangles feature representations into domain-invariant and domain-specific components. A novel cross-attention fusion module adaptively models interactions between these components, ensuring effective knowledge transfer while preserving dataset-specific discriminability. Furthermore, a mutual information optimization objective is introduced to maximize consistency among domain-invariant features and minimize redundancy among domain-specific ones, promoting complementary shared-private representations. Extensive experiments on multiple crowd counting benchmarks demonstrate that FSCA-Net effectively mitigates negative transfer and achieves state-of-the-art cross-dataset generalization, providing a robust and scalable solution for real-world crowd analysis.