# Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Sim-to-Real Object Pose Estimation with Contrastive Alignment and Pseudo-Label Refinement

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.21287 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.21287/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 30 of its 47 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Jun 2026.

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

- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [PoseCNN: A Convolutional Neural Network for 6D Object Pose Estimation in Cluttered Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00199/) (2017)
- [Simple Baselines for Human Pose Estimation and Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.06208/) (2018)
- [Bridging Theory and Algorithm for Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05801/) (2019)
- [A Brief Review of Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.03978/) (2020)
- [CosyPose: Consistent multi-view multi-object 6D pose estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.08465/) (2020)
- [BOP Challenge 2020 on 6D Object Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.07378/) (2020)
- [Category Anchor-Guided Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13049/) (2019)
- [HomebrewedDB: RGB-D Dataset for 6D Pose Estimation of 3D Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03167/) (2019)
- [Rethinking the Heatmap Regression for Bottom-up Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15175/) (2020)
- [Photorealistic Image Synthesis for Object Instance Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.03334/) (2019)
- [SPEED+: Next-Generation Dataset for Spacecraft Pose Estimation across Domain Gap](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.03101/) (2021)
- [Robust Multi-Task Learning and Online Refinement for Spacecraft Pose Estimation across Domain Gap](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.04275/) (2022)
- [Regressive Domain Adaptation for Unsupervised Keypoint Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.06175/) (2021)
- [Occlusion-Aware Self-Supervised Monocular 6D Object Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10339/) (2022)
- [DPODv2: Dense Correspondence-Based 6 DoF Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.02805/) (2022)
- [Survey on Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Semantic Segmentation for Visual Perception in Automated Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.11928/) (2023)
- [DiffusionNOCS: Managing Symmetry and Uncertainty in Sim2Real Multi-Modal Category-level Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.12647/) (2024)
- [TexPose: Neural Texture Learning for Self-Supervised 6D Object Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.12902/) (2022)
- [Bridging the Domain Gap in Satellite Pose Estimation: a Self-Training Approach based on Geometrical Constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.12103/) (2022)
- [Challenges for Monocular 6D Object Pose Estimation in Robotics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.12172/) (2023)
- [ConR: Contrastive Regularizer for Deep Imbalanced Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.06651/) (2023)
- [Adaptive Neural Network-based Unscented Kalman Filter for Robust Pose Tracking of Noncooperative Spacecraft](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.03796/) (2022)
- [Spacecraft Pose Estimation Based on Unsupervised Domain Adaptation and on a 3D-Guided Loss Combination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.13415/) (2022)
- [Uncertainty-Aware Knowledge Distillation for Compact and Efficient 6DoF Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.13053/) (2025)
- [COD: Learning Conditional Invariant Representation for Domain Adaptation Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.06638/) (2024)
- [Shape Consistent 2D Keypoint Estimation under Domain Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.01589/) (2020)
- [Manifold-Aware Self-Training for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation on Regressing 6D Object Pose](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10808/) (2023)
- [Towards Self-similarity Consistency and Feature Discrimination for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.06490/) (2019)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) enables robust transfer of knowledge from simulated to real environments while exploiting a subset of unlabeled target data to improve real-world performance. Existing UDA methods for Object pose estimation often rely on global feature matching, multi-stage larger frameworks, or image translation pipelines, which tend to overlook the pose-specific information embedded in feature representations. To bridge this limitation, we introduce CAPLR that targets the adaptation of pose-sensitive features in localized regions, ensuring that domain alignment preserves the geometric cues essential for accurate pose estimation. CAPLR achieves UDA with three key components: (1) Efficient Cross-Domain Pairing strategy leveraging intermediate features to identify pose similar image pairs across domains without supervision; (2) Contrastive Alignment to perform feature alignment at localised regions in both intermediate and task-specific representations; and (3) Consistency-Based Pseudo-Label Refinement to improve reliability by encouraging stable target predictions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CAPLR achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple well-known object pose estimation benchmarks featuring diverse and challenging scenarios.