# Orthogonal Knowledge Refreshing for Domain-Incremental Object Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.17340 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.17340/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 43 of its 61 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Jul 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 43)

- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [The Cityscapes Dataset for Semantic Urban Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.01685/) (2016)
- [Benchmarking Neural Network Robustness to Common Corruptions and Perturbations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.12261/) (2019)
- [Learning without Forgetting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.09282/) (2016)
- [Conditional Prompt Learning for Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05557/) (2022)
- [Learning Transferable Features with Deep Adaptation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.02791/) (2015)
- [BDD100K: A Diverse Driving Dataset for Heterogeneous Multitask Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.04687/) (2018)
- [Experience Replay for Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.11682/) (2018)
- [Efficient Lifelong Learning with A-GEM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.00420/) (2018)
- [Learning to Prompt for Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.08654/) (2021)
- [Do We Really Need to Access the Source Data? Source Hypothesis Transfer for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.08546/) (2020)
- [Exploring Plain Vision Transformer Backbones for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16527/) (2022)
- [DualPrompt: Complementary Prompting for Rehearsal-free Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.04799/) (2022)
- [Gradient Projection Memory for Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.09762/) (2021)
- [Orthogonal Subspace Learning for Language Model Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.14152/) (2023)
- [DyTox: Transformers for Continual Learning with DYnamic TOken eXpansion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.11326/) (2021)
- [Rainbow Memory: Continual Learning with a Memory of Diverse Samples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.17230/) (2021)
- [Strong-Weak Distribution Alignment for Adaptive Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04798/) (2018)
- [S-Prompts Learning with Pre-trained Transformers: An Occam's Razor for Domain Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12819/) (2022)
- [Prompt Distribution Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.03340/) (2022)
- [Cross-Domain Weakly-Supervised Object Detection through Progressive Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.11365/) (2018)
- [Class-Incremental Learning: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.03648/) (2023)
- [Model Adaptation: Historical Contrastive Learning for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation without Source Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.03374/) (2021)
- [MeGA-CDA: Memory Guided Attention for Category-Aware Unsupervised Domain Adaptive Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.04224/) (2021)
- [Source-Free Domain Adaptation via Distribution Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.11257/) (2022)
- [Overcoming Catastrophic Forgetting in Incremental Object Detection via Elastic Response Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02136/) (2022)
- [VDM-DA: Virtual Domain Modeling for Source Data-free Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14357/) (2021)
- [Instance Relation Graph Guided Source-Free Domain Adaptive Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15793/) (2022)
- [Active Learning for Domain Adaptation: An Energy-Based Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01406/) (2021)
- [Layerwise Optimization by Gradient Decomposition for Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.07561/) (2021)

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

- [Losing the name before the box: measuring and repairing what narrow fine-tuning costs a detector outside its deployment vocabulary](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.36426/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Domain-incremental object detection (DIOD) requires models to continually adapt to new domains while preserving prior knowledge. Recently, parameter-efficient fine-tuning offers a promising avenue, wherein a pre-trained model is frozen and a small number of learnable parameters are injected for downstream tasks. However, these methods risk overwriting critical past knowledge, triggering inter-domain interference and performance degradation. To address this challenge, we propose Orthogonal Knowledge Refreshing (OKR), a simple yet effective framework for DIOD. OKR incrementally constructs independent domain-specific subspaces via dedicated low-rank branches for each domain, which are seamlessly fused for a holistic decision, enabling conflict-free capacity expansion without domain selection during inference. To minimize knowledge interference during fusion, we present a gradient-based orthogonal refreshing strategy that projects gradient updates of new domains onto the orthogonal complement of the fused historical subspace, supporting continual adaptation without forgetting. Moreover, to mitigate semantic fragmentation across domains, we enforce topology-aware consistency, aligning the semantic structures of old and new domains. Extensive experiments validate the superiority of OKR, outperforming the best exemplar-free method by significant margins of +5.6% and +6.5% mAP on the Pascal VOC and BDD100K series, respectively.