Papers › A Free Lunch for Unsupervised Domain Adaptive Object Detection without Source Data

A Free Lunch for Unsupervised Domain Adaptive Object Detection without Source Data

10 Dec 2020arXiv:2012.05400archive 2025-07-28

Xianfeng Li, WeiJie Chen, Di Xie, Shicai Yang, Peng Yuan, ShiLiang Pu, Yueting Zhuang

Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) assumes that source and target domain data are freely available and usually trained together to reduce the domain gap. However, considering the data privacy and the inefficiency of data transmission, it is impractical in real scenarios. Hence, it draws our eyes to optimize the network in the target domain without accessing labeled source data. To explore this direction in object detection, for the first time, we propose a source data-free domain adaptive object detection (SFOD) framework via modeling it into a problem of learning with noisy labels. Generally, a straightforward method is to leverage the pre-trained network from the source domain to generate the pseudo labels for target domain optimization. However, it is difficult to evaluate the quality of pseudo labels since no labels are available in target domain. In this paper, self-entropy descent (SED) is a metric proposed to search an appropriate confidence threshold for reliable pseudo label generation without using any handcrafted labels. Nonetheless, completely clean labels are still unattainable. After a thorough experimental analysis, false negatives are found to dominate in the generated noisy labels. Undoubtedly, false negatives mining is helpful for performance improvement, and we ease it to false negatives simulation through data augmentation like Mosaic. Extensive experiments conducted in four representative adaptation tasks have demonstrated that the proposed framework can easily achieve state-of-the-art performance. From another view, it also reminds the UDA community that the labeled source data are not fully exploited in the existing methods.

PaperPDF

In Syntology View this paper on Syntology: its repositories, every harvested function with whether it ran, its licence and the call to fetch it.

Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

Code

No code repository is listed for this paper in the archive or in Syntology's graph.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Data AugmentationDomain AdaptationLearning with noisy labelsObject DetectionPseudo LabelSource Free Object DetectionUnsupervised Domain Adaptationobject-detection

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Source Free Object Detection Cityscapes to Foggy Cityscapes SFOD-Mosaic AP50 33.5 #12 of 13 Archive leaderboard report
Source Free Object Detection Cityscapes to Foggy Cityscapes SFOD AP50 30.6 #13 of 13 Archive leaderboard report

Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections